Category: Poetry

Thankful

Elisabeth Horan

Just let go—-

Time to take it easy—
Let them take you in 

Be the candle
Not the fire hazard 

Take a break from spitting tacks
Bending over fighting back 

No one’s going to help you
They’ll leave you writhing in the blood warm 

Earth. Lift your heart up out your chest
Splat it on the sidewalk. Rip the soul

 Right out of your belly wring it dry, hang
Up for the rest to see what

You become. Ate enough shit you say, I
Split. Drank enough heartache, split. Let 

Go, what’s the point. Be
Thankful for what God didn’t do to you,  

So take
your lick
s, the bit
ch, the stam
ps, the bott
le, the mot
el, the need
le, the cita
tion, the
jail bir
d, the dad
dy, the flous
ie, the orph
an, the beg
gar, the can
cer, the stitch
es the den
tures the gl
ass and make a
bird. Wat
ch my angel
go, it fli
es so soft
ly—-

Elisabeth Horan

New Year

Sarah Schaff

it’s the birds
migrate south

wings eager
like knives

not yet old
enough to know

how a mother mourns
how a mother mends

Sarah Schaff

Quarter Life Blues in Solitude
(Wind, Won’t You Blow Me Away?)

Tiffany Moton

wind, won’t you blow me away
from this holy mess, this rat’s nest
bed of filth and biting guilt
in which i lay
under wrinkled covers stained
in hours cried and tears dried
bust in and bare my paper skin
i beg you wind, blow me away
rustle the stale air heavy
with despair
before it crushes me for good
whichever way you choose to blow
that’s where i’ll go
mercurial breeze i’m down here
on my knees, please
don’t leave me behind, i’m sick
with a disease of the mind
that strangles my soul, enervates me
drains me to a mere vacancy within
a wreck of a body
delicate to touch, caution:
may collapse to dust if loved
too much
better left to croon
the quarter life blues in solitude
until i hear the whistle of your wings
one day
wind, won’t you blow me away?

Tiffany Moton

If Nothing Else

Jessalyn Johnson

but the general faults in the solar system
or the notes in the margins providing insight
to temporary notions of faded ideas;
if nothing else but if the rain reversed
or if a collection of dust as a force of nature
were to become profoundly instrumental 
the way children solve problems 
and adults solve themselves
or the half life of something with a shelf life
gives away nothing but numbers.
Potential may erupt like a geyser 
to show off like a prize
and harness like energy or another powerful force
for spinning in circles is a creative transit
that leaves with no destination 
but arrives someplace new
in a universe that exists only in theory
yet allows lightning bugs to glow.
So if nothing else, there is one last iris
or else, and only or else, is there nothing.

Jessalyn Johnson

Necromancy

Jennifer Wilson

I find it difficult to say things plainly, so I’ll just say that my mother’s hands were always full of bones.

She would hold them close and clutch them, bringing them to her chest when they were cold. And children with their flesh and their tears never phased her, their warmth not a thing to her mind. They just gave her good reason to relish the cold touch of bones and forego the future, enchanting the past and every power of death upon them as they sharpened themselves upon us.

Our marrow was so rich and warm. And our mother would eat it, unthinking, kissing the skeleton in a suck like an infant crying out that Mother Death and Our Lady of the Shadows never loved her so well as this. 

She made us hollow. She made us naked, ripping to rags even our bedclothes as emblems to bind and beatify the dead.

O I wish, O Mother, in knots and offerings, that these votives make pretty bows of my motives. O ghosts, give me strength to withhold. Mother, make me not weak to be eaten. Give me death for myself to control. 

And so her spells cast us as Others, unnecessary for her needs. Her adored drama, the sheer vastness and blankness of her bones bore us through. And, light as birds but flightless, we flew – the hollowness of our hearts coming through.

The fall to the floor seemed so much farther than our featherweight bones could forestall – and yet we met the earth with ease, barely bruised, free to wing wide through our down.

Jennifer Wilson

Soar

Sara Kelly

Kindness shoves little feet
forcefully into the Earth
during take off,
and soars into the sanctuary
of an open heart.

Humility rides
seeds of dandelions,
not unlike knights
charging into battle,
chanting repeatedly,
“love thy neighbor.”

We throw caution
to the wind,
But, alas, it falters,
for fear of the potential fall.

If we release love
into the atmosphere,
will it fly high into the sky,
and sing a song of hope?
Will it return to solid ground,
and reassure us of
all the beauty
that surrounds us?

Sara Kelly

Halycon

Hilda Coleman (Jupiter)

I am kindly haunted by
the colors that dress my mind
of purple,
pink, and yellow,
a swirl of the trix-yogurt
I used to like as a kid

at 6am today
the morning was fluorescent,
intrinsically connected to
the city,
the palettes of color
aligned to resemble art

it was simple.
it was just like when we hiked this
together, except now

I was mixed
into the sky,
adopted by nature
All I needed were wings.

As I hiked that mountain myself
my hand laid on my chest,
echoing vibrations,
blood pumping
thump, thump,
My breathe shortened, then
rose up again,
like a thermometer
up and up
I was so alive.
my wrist beeped, as it read

“200 BPM”

and all I could think about
was how alive I could feel,
without you.

Hilda Coleman (Jupiter)

Journal Entry:

War blew in, blew in savagely
against and with sway. March 8, 2017

Judy DeCroce

green soldiers of March
tipped, tipping to a fall
in a theatre of engagement
uprooted casualties 

their twist and snap
swelling piles of death
bullied to the last 

by a weapon unseen
falling without grace
branches, lost limbs,
tangled or straight 

yet there stands victors
victors among them—distinguished
in wind’s accent

Judy DeCroce

the tricks of bandages
A.H. Lewis

It’s like a free fall
and your marrow becomes wind and your eyes are parched,
but down isn’t a direction and up is a beating heart.
The hollow parts of your lungs where breath no longer hides:
the questions arise from there.
Did we jump? Was I pushed?
Midair, it matters little.
So many pretenses, now this one of flying.
How long is the fall? Where is the earth?
These are the tricks of bandages,
the sweet poison of empty philosophy
like a pacifier for newborn screams.
We have to be close, what else could there be?
Despite the view, it dawns:
we weren’t meant to fly.
I dare to peek our progress—
there is no stitch of ground; we cast no shadow.
But my, how far we’ve fallen.

A.H. Lewis

Writing is a kind of monsoon

Satya Dash

It seems futile
to attempt a poem about rain
knowing well that everything that is to be said
has already been said.

But then writing isn’t as much about saying
as it is about feeling. And percolation of that
feeling – the blood and bone of a poem 

into every vessel of your porous body,
slowly building its empire of fluff-
a redolence where to beg
is to demand
turning you slowly
knob after knob
into a floating canopy
of fleece 

By the time you see a boy emerge from the mist
near a window in an aeroplane
and wave at you,
you’ve realized you’re
nothing
but
a quintessential cloud.

You suck in your stomach in vanity and wave back.
And once the plane is out of sight,
you exhale
and
rain.

Satya Dash