Category: Poetry

AW, SHUCKS

Sasha Carney

I’m eight years old and I’m shucking corn on the sun-splashed patio. I’ve just learned how to clench my pudgy fists and snap off the stem, dig my ragged nails under the whisper-rough leaves and unfurl what’s underneath.

Mother scoops up the naked corn to boil in her big corn pot. I watch the waxy kernels plump and swell to starch-soaked sweetness, and have the urge to plunge my fingers in.

I’m eight years old and my aunt gives me a book called ‘Dangerous Book For Girls’, and I understand all at once that gender is a peril so I make myself a double agent, creeping through the underbrush in black wool tights, whispering intel to a cardboard walkie-talkie with no one on the other end.

No one knows my real name, not unless they can read the Morse code I scratch into the corn husks before they’re buried in mulch, or hear the words I smuggle into the rolling boil of the pot, and I am gleeful, I am undetected, I’ve Flat-Stanley-ed myself into two dimensions, superspy in thorn-torn thighs, chewing garden mint like tobacco in gangster movies, or scaling trees like skyscrapers, and womanhood can catch me if it can, because mother, I’m on the run.

The Dangerous Book for Girls says spies in World War Two carried a cyanide capsule threaded round their neck, which they would chew if they were captured till their limbs stilled and they bubbled at the mouth. I touch the necklace my grandma gave me for Christmas and wonder, absentmindedly, what it would be like to want to die, and I

wrote my will when I was four. I wrote my will when I was four, which should have been a warning sign, but it was simple, harmless, really. Scrawled hastily, decoded, on Winnie the Pooh stationery: Dear God, I want to be buried, not burned.

Dear God, tuck me soft under the compost. Dear God, let my soft tissues simmer and bubble and seep into the earth. Dear God, let something grow from me.

Gender is a masquerade, is an evening charade, is a code name. I’m far too young to watch James Bond but Mother puts it on at Christmas anyways and femme fatales stalk my screen, blow poison kisses, turn stiletto heels into stiletto knives, and the message is clear.

I’m fifteen and I kiss two boys at a party and keep my eyes open the whole time. I’m sixteen, and I laugh drunkenly when a man grabs my ass in a chicken shop. I’m seventeen, and there are worse stories I could tell. Gender as trauma and defense mechanism both. We don’t live in a house with a porch anymore, and I don’t shuck corn anymore, that’s for little hands speckled with nail polish and invisible ink, but I’m still a spy of sorts.

I’m eighteen and womanhood fits me like an outer husk, half-rotting, that I tried to fling from the patio long ago. I’m eighteen and my mother doesn’t know my real name but it’s  not a game, gender is a no-man’s-land and I’m sick of being undercover,

and I want to scream at the boiling, starch-soaked sky:

unhusk me, motherfucker
pop my tits like kernels of uncooked corn,Mother,
dig your dirty thumbnail under my skin,
don’t flinch if I bleed, just like everything else,
infection can always be covered or shed,
boil me to a pulp in your big corn pot,
motherfucker, I changed my mind, I want to be burned.

Sasha Carney

Humanist Heresy, Avignon

Susan E. Gunter

The words he penned outlive the tomb of time—
“We look about for what we find inside.”
A clerk in Clement’s court, Petrarch rhymed
on living angels. He and Clement turned the tide

from out to in—from god to man—from saint
to beast. “I am a sinner among sinners”, Clement boasted
as he baited the white bear in his menagerie. Taint
of florins, stench of power, taste of roasted

gilded capon, embrace of whore—this pope
indulged, sold indulgences—then saved
Jews, fed the starving, to the plague-stricken gave hope.
He and Petrarch so loved the world they braved

hell to tear the dark tapestry that Rome
had woven, making instead a human poem.

Susan E. Gunter

Dancing Fountain

Marianne Brems

Random renditions,
of complex water jets,
height,
duration,
erupting in
symphonic patterns,
from a street level fountain
into the penetrating heat
of the town square.

Smiling children taken
by unpredictable rhythms
of ever changing streams
rush through a gap
in the broken curtain of water,
shoulders drawn,
arms lifted,
smiles dissolving into laughter–
Repeat, then repeat,
wet clothes pasted to skin.

Fewer more prudent adults,
beckoned
by the soul of the fountain,
plan their course
between the chords
of a liquid melody.
Gleefully they dart through
with measured precision,
just once, maybe twice,
helpless to outsmart the dance,
unwilling to soak themselves
before enchanted onlookers.

Unconcerned,
this intricate orchestra
continues bursting skyward.

Marianne Brems

Portrait

Leah Gonzalez

Then I hear the first clicks of the shutter,
aperture opens and closes,
like a gaping mouth feeding on my flesh.
I unfurl myself and stretch my body
along the hardwood floor,
smacking my skin like icy marble,
my only wardrobe a royal coat of fine dust
draped over me to keep me warm.

My body starts to move and
I no longer inhabit my bones.
They move on their own,
turning and twisting me
into different shapes.

My body a foreign object.
My jaw quivers and I can’t stop moving
otherwise I will freeze.
I must keep moving.
I must keep moving.

I watch myself in the mirror,
glowing in its gilded frame,
cracked and flecked with gold,
like how I feel inside, sometimes.
She crouches near me,
her camera pointing at the mirror,
and me, her subject.

In her eyes, the question that she won’t ask.

After all, it’s not every day
I ask this of a stranger,
nor a friend,
acquaintance is too strong a word.
Is there a word for someone you meet once
and never see again?
Two strangers who crossed paths
and never spoke again.
Until tonight.

My body feels itself
for the first time,
I don’t think about the camera,
I barely think about her presence,
because something is happening,

I’m not sure what, but I feel my body,
feel the goosebumps, feel the hardwood floor,
feel my softness, feel the space of my surrender.

The rain beats down an army on the roof,
washes away the spores of self-doubt and ridicule
that have congealed imaginary spheres inside of me,
liberating the alleys and the creeks of my veins
The sliding glass doors look out into obscurity,
reflecting the two women.

I see myself in the gilded mirror,
my curls sprawled on the floor,
my body a sumptuous feast.
I have never seen myself like this before.
My face looks different, the angles sharper,
the eyes brighter, two moons in a bruised sky.

Am I that creature, eyes glowing,
peeking back at me through the dark?

Leah Gonzalez

Constellations

Paul Bluestein

The curtain of clouds is lifting
on the stage of the evening sky.
The stars are weary,
cast in their unchanging roles
night after night until time itself ends .
Yet, without applause or bouquets of flowers,
the constellations play out their cosmic tragedy,
chasing around and around the nighttime set
like riders on a slow-spinning carousel,
but never catching the object of their pursuit.
Aquarius, Capricorn,
Virgo, Gemini and Orion
(accompanied by a supporting cast of rams,
scorpions, fish, bulls and crabs),
perform their eternal dance
while we watch in awe.

Paul Bluestein

Once

Surabhi Parmar

​I resemble you
Or We resemble us!
Worlds apart and together souls
Call upon to protest
And meet
Out of the meek crowd of everyday chores;
Here I shout;
There you stand.
Here I laugh;
There you gaze.
I move and you pass;
I laugh and you surpass
A spirit of Zeel around
The bones and
Look into me
Through your wide purple eyes;
And I behold
You-
Us-
The doppelgangers
Searching for each other throughout the time
On earth
And once
May be once- I know
We will collide and
On that day
I will look into your bright purple eyes.

Surabhi Parmar

Harsh Drenching of an Early Spring Rain

Jeffrey Yamaguchi

A discarded painting
left in the alley
long enough for no one to notice
people stepping in disremembrance
taking a shortcut and tossing garbage
despite the incongruous colors
melding shapes within and beyond the frame

Harsh drenching of an early spring rain
the shades and hues on the canvas
bleed themselves onto the dilapidated street
a solitary figure throws shadows
across the expanse of the alleyway
catches an ephemeral vantage amidst the cracks
to see what no one is seeing

Jeffrey Yamaguchi