Impermanence

Impermanence by Rebecca O’Bern The bay window opens to the north.It’s foggy out. I grab the gray, knittedsweater you bought my last birthday. The dead pull us apart so easilyas if we’re the ones wrapped in tight string,transmuted into nothing in the dark. I never used to believe in dying. No needwhen an afterlife awaits, a resurrectionsuspended in clouds and dust. Death, then, becomes a cold marathon,maybe a sprint, but somethingwith end. Something measured between existing and existing again,moon to next moon. Sleep and light.Your daughter picked up your ashes today, and as our fingertips touchedI was reminded again how I didn’t callenough before our last words diminished to smoke that always tastesof home, doesn’t it, wood stove burningevening timber. I wasn’t lying about the bay window, curtains drawnand tied back, staying put, can’t help ifsmoke plumes escape to the trees. Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz

Granite Basin

Granite Basin by Sofia Fall I used to run up there on Perseverance Trail when I lived in the apartment  on top of Gold Street where it met Basin  Road and all I had to do all day was   run or walk for miles in the rain and try to think of nothing except the false hellebore holding the droplets on its pleated leaves in perfect   viscous spheres. It was early in June. The only  person I knew in the whole drenched town had taught me that false hellebore  was poisonous to humans. It causes    the heart to slow, induces vertigo. I couldn’t  stop picturing how it would feel to chew the leaves to stringy pulp and watch  the mountains go blurry and succumb   to the mists that always enveloped them,  until it was all dizzy and invisible, me and the narrow trail above the gorge through the illuminated valley. I wanted   my heart to go so slow no creature  could discern its beating. Instead, I just kept running, tried to make it every day all the way to the washout without stopping,   ran faster so the hellebore became so smeared and green in my peripheral vision it glowed. I hated having to live every moment in real time, always   seeing with utter clarity. I hated letting every single leaf of that abundant verdant poison go. Only the bears ate it.  Poetry Home Art by Robin Young

Polishing

Polishing after Erica Reid I store recordings of birdsong on my phone.  I don’t know which birds, or how to learn,    or if it’s important to know. I need to earn prizes for things, always have. My mother   called me an apple polisher & she was right.  Who gives someone a dirty apple? I do    everything the right way, & when I can’t  I cry. On my phone you can listen to birds   from 2016, they may not even be alive anymore. Did they say all they needed   to say? Would they be proud of me,  replaying their chittering with a studious   expression? My mother was not proud  that I wanted the world to love me, that I    craved little head-pats from strangers & made homework for myself, then    completed it. Cemeteries are great places to overhear birds. Often I read wives’ names    from the headstones, in case no one else  has spoken them aloud in a while. I polish   the marble lambs on baby graves with my  sleeves. See how good I can be? See   what doesn’t bother me? It is time I knew these birds: where do they sleep, do they learn    faces, do they play favorites? Which ones drill holes, which ones like apples, which ones   are red? Word by word I’ll learn their language,  the kind things they might have said. Poetry Home Art by Marina Leigh

Falling

Falling by Ashley Hoiland Last night my daughter came to the side of the bed with a nightmare still in her eyelids. As I slid her body, like a velvet puppy, under the sheets next to me, she said the dream was about a war.  And I see how the soft folds of her six-year-old brain  could get there.    The next morning, she fell on her scooter and told me after, “I fell violently to the ground.” And is there another way to fall?    When the cottonwood tree in the backyard had to come down, five men pulling with a rope guided her body, 80 feet of it,  piece by piece, back to the earth.  The whole house shook when each section hit the sloping summer grass.    I wondered if the tree would forgive me when I took down the fence and allowed the men into the yard to take her.   And today, on a Wednesday morning,  when my sister and her daughter went to get the breakfast check at Denny’s, an older woman in a booth alone had already paid for it.   So, to my own daughter going forward, some falls are violent,  and sometimes a stranger catches you believing, at all cost, that you cannot be broken, not this time.  Poetry Home Art by Emily Rankin

Transfiguration

Transfiguration by James Engelhardt The lake is only a lake because water. Time filled the valley, drowned the stream,  covered the sedges charging up the tree line.   The lake is a lake because someone hauled rock  to some line they imagined, and now a boat glides  over that imagination past the lake’s edges and inlets.   A sandhill crane angles through, tracing a path cranes have traced for millions of years. And the day is gone like a breath. The forest, too.   The lake will drain. The boat will become earth—as will we, sitting in its belly,  watching what is strange become stranger. Poetry Home Art by Kathleen Frank

Picture of Us

Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth for Rachel Anthony It was my birthday and we stood—you, beautiful, youthful; me, spectacled, unable for the life of me to comb my hair correctly—in the lobby of a hibachi steak house. After, I remember we were all over each other in the cramped cabin of my truck, in a field, on the deck of your pool. I don’t remember you crying, though maybe you wanted to. And I wasn’t helping, being myself. We’d weather a few more months’ worth of disasters together: I took and used what you gave and after, always remorse. Rinse, repeat. It’s funny now, sort of—nothing we could make last, at least. I keep the picture as a bookmark in Auden’s Collected Poems, placed now facing ‘Lullaby,’ so it’s like the two of us are reading poems together— lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm—Auden knew what affection costs us in headache, heartache; ours no different, so it’s fitting to leave us there, in his care. We do look happy, standing by the lobby couches, against each other bright in the camera flash, under lights, my class-ringed finger gripping your shoulder, yours my waist. The other day I saw you engaged, saw the picture of the two of you closer than us, faces touching, smiles honest. He looks nice, and you, happy. But between us: what we said, how we suffered, it’s all still there, though better as memory (we’d have been very unhappy together); better like this: posed always in affection, in the dark of leftover words Poetry Home Art by Ellen June Wright