8/2/2023 1 Comment Poetry by Natalie GiarratanoKrystian Olszanski CC
We Could Break Forever I scan our shared spaces for the cylindrical mouths singing their grotesque white god song about dis- membered fetuses and unidentifiable grade schoolers. But I will not turn my poems to ash for gunshot choruses while our kids turn to stone in dark classrooms or forget that beauty matters: the rippling sheen of a horse’s muscled haunch or my daughter pointing at the bluest fish jumping out of the pinkest water in a painting. I know how easily we could break forever. Keep playing at ghosts in malls, theaters, grocery stores. Become a fucking nest of apparitions. For so goddam long, we’ve recklessly othered and forgotten the true skin of terrorism, which has always been the color of privilege. We have to fly down from the moon now. Flock back to this gutted country. Show up with our throats shining. Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Waxwing, McNeese Review, Superstition Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. Originally from rural southeast Texas, she edits and lives in Fort Collins, CO, and was the city’s 2018-2020 poet laureate.
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8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Emma JanssenNicholas_T CC
Greek Class Mourning Poem In which Antigone returns to Western Mass / Polynices returns to Western Mass and I am there too / where Polynices taught Antigone how to drag the smoke out of a cigarette and later / years later / taught her that she was blackening her lungs / he would know, wouldn’t he? And he quit / for a time / but she never quite could, Antigone is stubborn / that blood / is stubborn / in class they call it fate / or curse / but I always called it addiction / regardless / they’re all passed down / through our bodies / our bodies / just vessels / for the generations to pass through In which Polynice’s body was left out / for days and / the Michigan cold picked like ravens / at his eyes un / wept / un / returned In which Antigone took a red eye back to Thebes which still hung with Jocasta’s wintered silence / all these years later it stays in the blood / in the highways In which Antigone and I slice apples / and when she buries him / she mourns in the Greek way / tearing at the hair, my mother’s soft hair, covering the face in dust, her face / which I see rising up through mine these days In which Antigone survives it, and I do too, and she takes me away from the Dirce’s springs / the Theban groves / the smoke / thronged hills. The Black Lake When I was fifteen I decided that I was finally done carving myself into the world. I decided that I had become myself. That I belonged to my body and my body belonged to me and everything was this single selfness. When I was fifteen my body and I took a red-eye across the country. My mother was there too. We took a red-eye across the country and I woke up in the carcass of autumn. I was fifteen and the world was rotting leaves and birch trees that arched like ribs and an icy black lake like a pupil that had burst and swallowed the iris of an eye. The world was rotting and we had come to bury my mother’s brother. I was fifteen and I had just finished carving myself into the world. I was fifteen and I knew the boundaries of my selfness. Ice traced along the boundaries of the black lake and melted under a sticky white sun. My mother drove me along roads that you can’t ink into paper. She unfurled them. I was fifteen and she was forty-nine, or maybe fifteen, or maybe six. The boundaries of her selfness twitched and tangled there, like someone had snapped a taut wire and it had coiled in and in and in on itself. Autumn was rotting but frost came and tried to stitch it together — mud hardened at the graveyard, ice traced along the boundaries of the black lake. We buried my uncle with his mother. I was fifteen. My mother’s hands shook. Next to my mother, I shook. I was fifteen and time was no longer a thing bound and stitched. Time was the lake’s burst pupil, and time was my mother unfurling backroads along her arms. I was fifteen and I was finally done carving myself into the world. In the graveyard, snow flurried around my head. Or maybe it didn’t. But I see it that way, now. When I was fifteen, time was rotting among the birches ringing the black lake. When I was fifteen, I walked away from my body and became my mother, my grandmother, my aunt. When I was fifteen, we buried my uncle with his mother and I tucked my selfness beside them in the frost dirt. When I was fifteen, I belonged to my body and my body belonged to the black lake and my selfness was eaten by winter. Emma Janssen is a 21 year-old queer poet from the Bay Area who reads books and does math at the University of Chicago. Outside of school and writing, she can be found swimming in cold water, doing environmental journalism, and chasing after street cats. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Heather GluckJochen Spieker CC
Dying in Reverse Caring for the living makes it easy to hate-- the moon-faced dogs I don’t feed, my shoulder pain that comes without reason in the night, big dead beetles in the yard. Our new puppy paws insistently at the screen door, splashes the water out of her bowl and licks it off the ground. Takes existence the long way. The dirt we make each week is sucked into a bag and sent to the dump. We thank it for being gone. The ashes of Mason, our last dog, are in a mass grave in Massachusetts, burned with other recipients of human love. What compels me to say I care for my father? In a room I don’t often visit it smells like skin and he sometimes chokes on the bile from the tube in his neck. The puppy scrambles onto his forbidden chest and bites with sharp milk teeth, approaching hurt with excitement, as all young things do. The nurse sucks the bile from his tube and he can breathe again. Outside, where he can’t go, the grass moves like a storm of blinking eyes. Absolution He used to press himself to the vinyl bottom of the pool, and I would stand on his back. We called it surfing. It was before I did anything but love him. When he learned I was a girl he slammed the hospital door and cried. It’s an intelligence test, he would whisper to me when he saw a person struggle. And then, often, You failed! On Sunday mornings, he took me to ice skating lessons. He skimmed the perimeter in fast laps, the same circle for a silent hour. I sought masculine things to bring him, like a raven with shiny buttons. A plastic muscle car from the Duane Reade, knowledge of obscure 60s rock, a piece of iron a smith helped me bend into a simple heart. When we argued and I won, he told me I took after him, an appropriation of my mind I did not completely disagree with. Now he is only earnest; his eyes bulge from a thinning face. I want to go swimming with you. I wonder when his sentences became so simple. I know, I answer. We haven’t shared sweetness like this in a lifetime. Still, he would sink. His lungs filling quietly. I don’t know what promises to make him, but I have to save one of us. Physical Therapy When you are in a hole, stop digging. When you stop digging, you are still in a hole. I will cut you open and put these inside you I threaten my dog, but I am not one for fulfilling. I slip the pills in a cherry tomato and try again. I am engaging anew with my childhood fantasies. Always a beautiful woman licking my tears. I used to obsess over the fine carbon of ash, its tendency to fuse with all materials. I slept with burnt fingers under my nose pretending I was in a fire. My mother flicks a lighter over two tall candles in the kitchen sink and now we know it’s Friday. I am engaging anew with my muscular system and also with time. I can travel back and forth across a room quickly. Momentum, intention, and business is how I prefer to walk. I sit at my desk counting heartbeats. I think I used to be something or want to be something. Every day I forget to do it. This is not panic -inducing. I will not make myself sick because I am not sick. Beautiful women are sirens, they offer me a version of myself I want to be. Jealousy -inducing, pulling the successful off their tracks. How to compare the legacy of the sirens to Odysseus? I will detach myself from beauty and consider motion. Climb out of the hole. Fine, then measure the hole. To understand what is necessary I will cauterize the stupid things inside me. Heather Gluck is a poet and editor from New York who received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work is published or upcoming in Anthropocene, Palette Poetry, Poetry Online, Beyond Words, High Shelf Press, and others. Her portfolio was shortlisted for the 2021 Tennessee Williams Writing Contest. She has served as Editor in Chief of the literary magazines Exchange and Some Kind of Opening. She is the Managing Editor for MAYDAY Magazine and a Nonfiction Editor at Majuscule. See more at heathergluck.com. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Brooke Mitchellminka CC
Domestic Addiction My mother asks for a glass of water. Kyle fills one for her. She asks for ice, so he reaches into the freezer, grabs three cubes with a bare hand, tosses them into the glass. A fleck of dirt floats in the water. He passes it to my mother. She gulps and gulps. He’s a fisherman. His palms cake soil and gravel to a Tupperware full of garlic-salted canned corn. Their love is a softer kind. The doting son and dependent mother. Different from my father and myself and our banter. He’s been sick, lately. Slower. Dried spit from the dogs coats our french doors and dead flies stick to yellow tape rolls above the island. My father’s spent cigarettes soak in the toilet. Yesterday my brother and mother went to the grocery store. I tried talking to him while they were gone. He stared right through me. But he’s never forgotten to leave the porch light on and a full plate in the fridge when I come home late. When he overdoses, I empty the cabinets and wash every dish in the house. Sweet Daughter Sting To kiss round glass openings, Tongue strawberry-needled. To settle my arguments with The moon and her sweet daughters. We are never addicted to What we assume we are. Our desires hang thick like air-bound doxa. I am drinking you, addicted To you. But maybe that Recognition is too easy an Answer. We buzz our veins Into wherever one finds the absence Of repercussions. Until morning Needles us awake. It all, always, comes With sweet daughter sting, hanging thick In the air, doxa, I’m addicted to Needing. Wanting. Push and pull, To alcohol glazing your lips in thin Coats only on nights when the constellations Beg us too hard to sear ourselves into their Sparkling canon. When love becomes worship, Becomes me bowing and dipping into your Body’s altar and offering nothing Of myself in return, How can I respond with anything but anger And poetry. Brooke Mitchell is a student of Creative Writing and Philosophy at Susquehanna University. Her time as Poet Laureate of Perry County informs her work helping to build the artistic community in rural Appalachia. Her recent writing can be found in the Santa Clara Review and upcoming in the New York Quarterly Review. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Jazmine AlumaMichiel Jelijs CC
PAPER BAG SKY A mother woke up on a bus headed straight for the ocean. From her window she could see glassy buildings, shiny parking lots, and a bar named after a line from a movie. The route was a straight shot along a street that was also the final destination: Sunset, where a paper bag sky would catch fire and smolder into the night. The ride into the scarlet sky was not smooth. When she was a child, her mother told her if she ever got lost to look for the mothers. They are the helpers. “Why not the fathers? she asked. “I will explain that another day,” said her mother. “Just look for the mothers.” The mother gazed around at the end-of-day bus riders. A stitch in her sweater came undone and her manicure flaked. There wasn’t a mother in sight. THIS IS HOW YOU LIVE Female elephants circle each other during labor-- a ring of I got you to hold the thunder, like a canyon follows a river running. Matriarchs help the calf rise— new feet meet wise earth. Elders even show the baby how to nurse. This, they seem to say, is how you live. But the cheetah-- she mothers alone. A single force against the stealth of midnight. Every four days, she moves her litter— to prevent predators. For eighteen months she does this, while her cubs become hunters, fierce enough to stand up to the sky. This, she seems to say, is how you survive. Jazmine Aluma (she/her) is a Jewish, Chicanx writer whose work has been published in The Boston Globe, LA YOGA Magazine, and Bust.com. She hosts a podcast called First Words, which explores the messiness of parenting and writing. Jazmine is also a teaching artist for Get Lit–Words Ignite, where she guides young people in the art of spoken word poetry. Jazmine is working on a collection of poetry and essays. www.jazminealuma.com. 8/2/2023 1 Comment Poetry by Brennig DaviesCarl Wycoff CC
Mark Rothko, Red and Pink on Pink, c.1953 But mainly I wanted to be a better person than I was, softer, more forgiving, no rough edge but red and pink on pink, gently blurring, I wanted that not to be as hard as it felt, I wanted it to be easy, I wanted not to have to try. In June I could have killed myself and didn’t, then spent the summer eyeing, with suspicion, the creases of my wrists, rubbed skin the shade of a foetus, as I went drifting through the supermarket, weeping in the gallery. So much colour, you know? What was I meant to do with it? I cut off my hair with a knife because someone had absconded with the scissors, and then sat as the sun rose over the city on the cold metal fire escape, full of that kind of giddy, unfeasible hope that comes not from running from flames but racing unfeasibly towards them. Manual for the Leaver Pack a bag. Listen, for the last time, to your mother, praying through the walls of the shack, the rise and soft fall of her homilies, your father snoring like a hog fattened for the spit. Tell no-one where you’re going. Follow the dirt road, feet shredded by the pebbles to ribbons. Don’t turn back when you hear their calling, the rise and hard fall of your name. Let the evening bleed you out with the sky, indigo and umber. Let the coyotes imagine they can eat you, then correct them. Find a diner. Have a coffee. Listen to a man with one arm tell you about a motel in Toledo and a lady called Precious. Silver the palm of the waitress with the coins you have spare. Keep walking, with lighter pockets. Pet a stray dog. Let it bite you if it wants to. Bite it back. Lie down next to the roadkill, degloved like second-hand puppets. Feel the rumble of the interstate purr in your marrow. Think of home, then stop thinking of it. Get back up. Forsake your own grave. Find a man who speaks no English but drives a truck. Ask him where he’s going and hop in. Let him drive you West, a passenger past the prairies and the rattlesnakes, or else the shadow of your father with the strap. Tell the stranger to go faster, wherever he’s going. Put your feet up on the dash. Brush your hand against his. Lean over. Crank up the radio. Brennig Davies is a writer from the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales. He won the BBC Young Writers Award 2015 and the Crown at the Urdd Eisteddfod 2019. His work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Litro USA, and various anthologies. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Maggie WolffCarl Wycoff CC
Surveys, Maps, and Mothers: C Cadastral a registry of lands, a surveying of ownership, family registry of want and need—unmet, one mother unable to save her daughter from a husband’s fist, her daughter unable to save her mother from the gun, the two of them creating a landscape of ownership built to hurt and made to haunt, the land I still walk across Cadastral map marking all the ways a mother forever owns a daughter, the pulse under a wrist scar, an inability to say I love you without armor Cardinal direction my mother had four children and none of us could become her compass, surpass her original cardinal direction—the first, a son, was a gift she wasn’t old enough to appreciate, he grew to pull south, away from his mother—the second, the first girl, was born drunk enough to die but she didn’t and so she became our north—forced to be strong, a beacon before she even had enough light—two more girls followed, one east, one west, constantly pulling each other in tug of war, both always caught in a middle country not their own Cartography late-night laptop detective searching white pages, police records, blackholes of wrong people, almost relatives—MacDonnell, Cooney, Gallagher, O’Conner-- names of Ireland dotting a Chicago map Central meridian my mother’s 18th birthday, she asked for a rare steak and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, furious hunger redcoiled through the three of us: grandmother, mother, and daughter, women asking for a burn, something meatier to get stuck in our teeth, the easiest distraction and release Clinometer instrument used to find the slope of elevation or depression in surveying highways, land, and other areas, depression is a family slope on various trajectories, upward slope is finding the right antidepressant to keep things level but numb, suicide is the downward slope we fight against—my mother was on antidepressants when she slit her left wrist over the bathroom sink, her mother was or wasn’t on antidepressants when she pulled the trigger five years later Contours lines on a topographic map joining points of equal heights, a game show prize wheel randomly spun until it stops somewhere I forgot, either by accident or choice-- my earliest memory flashes, interspliced film of grainy images—my mother, half naked and fully drunk, howl crying and stumbling as she fell into the hallway walls, and other adults or my teenaged siblings trying to steady her, dress her, and reach the front door, the house in murky movement until my mother disappeared to a detox facility—my sister’s earliest memory: the two of us hiding from the sounds of our father beating our mother, and my sister, less than 3 years old, tried to get me, only 19 months younger, to stop crying Contour interval elevation differences between adjacent contours on a map, learning young that only certain things are worth crying over and to hide it even then, a calculated refusal to cry as an adult, the elevation difference between my need for others and the learned instinct to erect walls Control points fixed points of known coordinates, my grandmother-- born in Chicago, a single mother of three in the 1950s catalogue of hot-meal-on-the-table-by-5 housewives and husbands who provided, lost somewhere in what her nieces and nephews will only tell me was “a difficult life” with an ending we all know Coordinates the found birth certificate of my grandmother and location of her gravesite with no documents of her existence in between, not even the obituary—she ghost lights my computer, a spectral ancestor County territorial division between husband and wife, mother and son, mother and daughter, sister and sister—mapped our counties and built then barricaded our cities Covenant a formal and binding agreement in relation to land, our covenant spans generations, binds us to the worst of our impulses, occupies soil from Chicago to the Everglades Culture a man-made feature on Earth shown on a map, addiction-- a culture of thirst—passed from mother to daughter, a network of unnamed roads, I tasted vodka mistaken for water, watched my father bloody my mother, and learned to lie about home all before starting kindergarten; in my deepest binges, my drunk crying vibrates the same tremble as hers—I silence myself—offering my willing throat to choke of bottle, my mother stumbling down the hallway to detox wakes me up on cold tile Surveys, Maps, and Mothers: D-E Degree all the miles between us can be plotted in degrees only when calculated from one fixed point (mother) to another fixed point (daughter), but the points remain moveable and unknown, an incalculable measurement Electronic distance measuring equipment a surveying instrument measuring distances using light or sound waves, my grandmother and mother grew up in Chicago winters, wind biting cheeks raw, the dull sun in grey sky melted to mush—I grew up in the constant light of Florida, unbearably hot and bearing me down to the ground, the rush of wind clattering a hurricane roof soaked in a rain born for damage, and waiting for the eye to pass over us in silence before the storm wall roared and rattled again Elevation little girls learn to keep their heads elevated above sea level when there is never anyone there to save them, this measurement manifests differently for each sister now—an inability to ask for help, childlike denial of the past, dangerous impulsivity rooted in longing Encumbrance a legal interest recorded on a mortgage, my mother never had a mortgage, lived on short-term leases, raised restless unrooted daughters carrying anchors Equator imaginary circle around the Earth dividing the sphere in half, the personal equator dividing my life since the beginning was my name, named Mary Margaret, but called Maggie as far back as memory reaches—the name Mary became associated with grief, a connection re-made when my mother would remind me I was named after her mother, I would go by Mary as an adult to make it less confusing on others-- it has taken years to go back to my real name, an imaginary circle between my hemispheres when someone asks my name and I instantly hesitate before answering Maggie Wolff is a poet, essayist, occasional fiction writer, and first-year Ph.D. candidate at Illinois State University. She recently won an AWP Intro Journals Award for her poetry, and her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Juked, New Delta Review, and other publications. 8/2/2023 1 Comment Poetry by Bleah PattersonCarl Wycoff CC
My grandma says dreams are little prophecies, we just have to ask God what they mean she dreams of cows she dreams of a field full of cows and they all need her “they all need me” she’s saying when she wakes up the cows they’re women “God” tells her “they’re women who need me” and then there’s the toilets she dreams of dirty toilets toilets that need to be cleaned but she needs to pee not until the toilets are cleaned “God” tells her “help others before you help yourself” she knows, “that’s what it means” of course I dream of her I dream of her cooking she feeds us all, before she feeds herself, at a large table she feeds us my uncle first his left thigh, his right arm he’s greasy but I don’t tell her that I dream even here of being polite afraid of what she might do she feeds us my mother next “it might be a little tough,” she apologizes and she’s right, my mother so much even here like herself even simmered slow and low “beat it until it’s tender,” my grandma’s voice echoes through my childhood up until now I dream we devour them all, all of her children I dream I escape the house right before we run out of meat for stew for bolognese for pot roast I dream she ate herself because there was no one left she was going to eat you next “God” says in my dream “she was going to eat you next” I’m saying when I wake up Bleah Patterson (she/her) was born and raised in Texas. She is a poet exploring generational and religious trauma. A current MFA candidate at Sam Houston State University, her work featured in The Brazos River Review; The Texas Review; the tide rises, the tide falls; The Hyacinth Review; and elsewhere. 8/2/2023 0 Comments Poetry by Courtney JustusDavid J CC
Origins Lane Lake-slicked kids were we, driving Jeeps and Caddies down 620 to the alley, where the lanes shone glossy, the pizza was cheap and we bowled like kings and queens. After my first strike, Jacob folded his hands into mine. I saw his crinkled eyes, our matching flannel. Our first closeness since those mornings at our pizza parlor, hips nudging behind the makeline, elbows colliding like Newton’s cradle. I not yet nineteen, Jacob spooning Elvis and George Strait through my parted lips, onto my artichoke tongue. Back then, Jacob crooned Elvis over the crank of the dough machine, the ring of the door, hit the highest notes in “Take on Me” as we layered pepperoni in circles like bullseyes. When I played Better Than Ezra – it felt like a lifetime – he asked, “What’s this?” and switched back to Elvis. This the music my father hummed as it thrummed in his sweltering Lincoln the summer I turned fourteen, ash blonde hair sticky with grease and whipping in the breeze. Florida highways gave way to Alabama, to plain lawns and my father gone before first light. I wanted to go home without pointing to a home. Not to the skeletons of houses off Origins Lane, the sepia townhouse where my brother waited up, where I turned twenty-one, echoes of Five Finger Death Punch echoing through hollow walls, matchbox of a house that our mother left again and again, that I fled for winding sidewalks snaking away from the lake to call my father, who didn’t answer, after my brother flung fruit and salt and blame, stood sentry at my bedroom door and then followed me, calling my name. Not to the strip mall parking lot where Gavin and I talked after work, his gaze lifted toward the indigo sky that the fireworks barely touched that starless July. Not to the strips of metal shack shops near Perpetuation Drive, the shadows of the Krav Maga, gates chained shut. Here Gavin uncapped glass bottles of grassy beer against the fence post. I’d told him we couldn’t go home and he didn’t ask why. Gavin carried me across rocky streams, watched me stare off the cliffside, shaking too hard to climb down. From there, I couldn’t point to the hills where my car almost slid down ice, down to the apartment where hands threw golf clubs and bar stools and a slice of time I thought mine, where police circled and my brother called to say Don’t come home. Gavin went off to war, bearing his tilted front teeth, shoulder-length locks newly shorn. He left his brothers the rock climbers, his sister the pianist folding clothes at Old Navy. Jacob still wants to make it big, still drives his green pickup, stubble fresh on his long jaw, humming his short songs for the girls he never loved, his ode about coming home, verses for the children he never had or held. When his truck got stuck behind snowbanks and ice walls, he played Elvis. Jacob writes to me for my birthday, but I don’t write back. I watch my brother’s name light up my phone, watch my father’s birthday pass hour by hour and don’t write back, swipe left on the music-loving Marine from my beach town and wonder if Gavin is still alive, if he still listens to Disturbed like we did tearing down hill country roads. I still play their version of “The Sound of Silence” as I stack clean flannel and summer blouses on the crooked bureau, stack books in boxes until they break. I sing in my car when no one’s around, in the August heat without my windows down, and all summer, my phone rings and rings and when I answer, it’s my brother saying Don’t come home. Song for the house where cedar shimmered / from the overgrown yard / floors sticky with watermelon / newly shattered / like a broken egg / cormorants and cardinals / emerging from the shards / or like tender teeth / splitting gums / like stalagmites festering / in puddles of ochre and amber / clean it up / he told me / big hands slick / with ruby juice / towering / over the beige tiles / the rickety chairs / that could cave / under too much weight / so I got / on my knees / scrubbed / my sternum / a fist of crows / while he watched / YouTube videos / of foxes / in his acrid blue room / once I saw / two men wrap / rubber bands / around / and around / and / ar ou nd / a watermelon / until / it burst / sometimes / I felt / like that watermelon / sunburnt and careening / down the asphalt / saying yes / no / yesyesyes / burning hours like incense / until I left the house / where my bed disappeared / in a sweep / of lilacs / taken as fast / as a warbler / in the maw / of a wolf / wanting wings / I keep resurrecting the dream/ where I flew / above the corner of Perpetuation and 620 / no turn light / I don’t drive / 620 anymore but / I like driving / alone / when I talk / about origins / I choke / on the bone / of this house until it crinkles / s o f t l y / in my throat / filling it / with harrow / no it’s marrow / I build a house / of my vanilla paperbacks / I conjure coffee / at my rickety table / monstera more holy / than the church I drove to / that incandescent July / when I knew the house / was only bones / gnawed until marrow lined teeth / like ashes on stone / on the street where wine / pooled in canvas shoes / and pink plastic heels / when the fires danced / at every house / except ours / I will only oversee / my own singeing / will stitch a wound / with votive candles / the colors of the lake / in winter and drought / evergreen and rusty blue / I bury clockwork bones / conjure lanterns / like the one I burned / before the carpeted staircase / the dying bamboo plant / the stuck back door / no boys ever snuck through / that only trapped bees/ from a hive we never found / the busted garage light / before I knew home / as something I could carve / from myself Burgundy In pockets of silence, I soften like a petal, burst burgundy at hands brushing through mine: the hands of builders, burn-gridded and singed, streaking the foundations of houses with sultry scrapes. Their limbs praise my jewel-dripping crown but tame the ground from which I grew it, spurn the churning roots beneath me, the arbors sprouting in my wake. Hands of musicians unearth words from the ivory keys of my ribs. My touch is mostly memory. I know how to make a piano sing, but how do you take it apart? Build from the keys a staircase, a doorstep, a shelter? A walled autumn garden, stalks standing sentry in salty air? But I don’t need rosewood to build a home, to construct the altar at which I pray. I don’t want roses or carnations flung at my water-swollen doorstep or wilting on the wasp-infected porch. I don’t want love letters littering my carpet like old receipts for coffee or fruit. Sometimes I am the girl digging a ruby from sienna soil. Sometimes I am the ruby: sleek and split, fractured into a dozen hard planes—the girl I was, the girl I am, all the girls I’ve wished I could be. Some sheer glint, all light and testament, some red drained like a quatrain cascading down faded keys. Some scattered like glitter stuck in curls of carpet, always visible but forgotten under the stamp of leather soles straight from the rain. Some scraped away with fingernails. Some scuffed by old boots, leather cracking like a hesitant mouth. I don’t want questions, half-inquiry, all excavation, that tear from me something that glints. A flash of mothering like unclasped petals, a father salted and buried, earthbound. My hard, red words burst beneath my sternum like poppies, always stretching to the tightened bud of my throat. I have been a burgundy girl in all seasons—fall with its crinkling sky, summer of the turning earth and my birth, spring squinting at soil still damp with snowmelt, winter when my hands blister, blood pooling like tiny rubies in my finger webbing. It spiders silently across the folds of me, the creases of my calloused fingers. Even without a crimson man to root me, even without the scrape of diamond or glass against my surface, without the creak of teakwood under my weight or the refraction of beams against my frame, I still feel ruby opening inside of me like a yearning mouth. Courtney Justus is a Texan-Argentinian writer living in Chicago. She is a 2022 Tin House YA Workshop alumna, a Best of the Net nominee, and a recipient of residencies from SAFTA and the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work appears in The Acentos Review, Barnstorm Journal, Defunkt Magazine and elsewhere. You can visit her at courtneyjustuswriter.wordpress.com. 8/2/2023 4 Comments Poetry by Alison HurwitzKrystian Olszanski CC
Storm Heckler Commit. This scrim of overcast is not worth shit: Quit your hovering, your smirk of muggy swelter, your lowering suggestion of inclemency. If sky’s a field, be done with airbrushed furrows. Squall. Crack open clouds, throw down a bolt, tear afternoon apart, whip wind to wrack complacency with thunder. Enough with your insipid susurration; the air is not your library to shush. Come on- catch me napping, frack this desultory hour electric in a welter of a deluge. Monsoon me. Drench my head in downpour, until my hair’s a rabid cataract, until my puckered arms stand plucked like naked geese. Serve adrenalin, body blading lightning till my voice twines up to tantrum sky, screaming out a maelstrom, tearing branches limb from limb. Too long I’ve stayed sleep-walking, forgetting what it is to wake a hurricane. Let me hurl invectives like hail-yes, into storm. Break open pent-up waiting, seismic shaking this collision, until my grief can finally tear free; let it tumble into current, rain and rift and snowmelt surging down the mountain till it slows, flows liquid salt to sea. Alison Hurwitz has been published in Tiferet Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Anti-Heroin Chic, Book of Matches, The Shore, Amethyst Review, Rust and Moth, Thimble Magazine, Speckled Trout Review, River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, The Jewish Writing Project, SWWIM Every Day, Minyan Magazine, Last Leaves Magazine and RockPaperPoem among others. Her work is forthcoming in Carmina Magazine. Alison lives with her family and rescue dog in North Carolina, officiates weddings and memorial services, and hosts Well-Versed Words, a free monthly online poetry reading. See more at alisonhurwitz.com |
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