Anticlimactic

I write a letter to an
ex-lover who seems to stay
behind the times on who’s
let who go. And I write to him
and call him several names
I wouldn’t call my mother
or my father,
names that would never come out
of Mother Theresa’s lips and when
I’m done, I crumple it up and
think about burning it
or eating it, but my fury is
tasteless and dry on paper.
-anna

February26poem: But You Took It

I said, please don’t take both the red
and the blue blood
from my veins – I need
at least one of them. Maybe –
We can share? But she took
both and just dropped me on
the verge between
the school we go to, and
her backyard.

-Rae

Lent Poem # 3: Sexless Wonderland

by Adam Parrow

To fall down a hole
filled with cuckoo clocks and
used bits of brick-a-brack,
I have fallen so far
behind.

The doormouse isn’t home
and his teacups lay
used and dirty in the sink.
I wash them for him.

What of the hatter
so mad he ran screaming
stark naked
among the slithy toves?
Did he remember to
leave me his itinerary?

I have been trimmed and
boiled. My manhood
is a mock turtle,
crying to be spared,
but tiny turtle voices don’t carry.
The clock tick tocks on

and I have always empathized
with white rabbits. They, running
they, late. All
bramble knees and thump thump

Thump of my ventricle,
hollow echo of my ear,
In the pin pricks of my finger
tip, and the flaccid hunch of
my back. Thump thump thud.

Of Lanterns & Lighthouses

Here’s to the body that folds
and fumbles. Here’s to the cock
you weren’t born with. Here’s
to flammable nightgowns.

It’s got to do with the hard-to-find
postcards that make a place look
as dirty as it is. The unswept pile
of glass you were always
stepping around.

Here’s to the moment
you hauled your breath up
from prostration, like a suitcase
of air, and became
a bright red sail.


jade

March3poem: I was patient with it, Dad.

I was patient with it, Dad, I was
Patient with the computer, the way you
Used to say, just be patient with it when I was
Younger because it’d strike the keys and flick
The powerswitch on and off, I managed it, I was
Patient with it Dad, and it came back to me, it
Came back to me, Dad.

-Rae

March2Poem: Goodbye Dad, until next season.

Riding there – yellow of cab and smell
Of dusty upholstery trapping
Motes of ash and skin and citydirt – we sat
Silent. Talking through our sameness. Needn’t mention
The view. He’ll be thinking
The same as I.

Riding back – yellow of straining moon
And smell of wet grease and sponges
Over nostrils – I was in the minutes between
The first drop off and classroom where you fight
The effort to cry because it’s
Unseemly.

Arrived home – floor stopping my shoulders
Bouncing, nose painfully propping my pink face up:
the floorboards are so close the
tears splash back
into their own ducts to be cried again – this could be
Neverending.


-Rae

March1Poem: Home (abecedarian)

Home

Is birdhouses and broken
bird bodies buried carefully - coddled
between bulbs of clematis and daffodil,
shoe-boxed, decaying and eaten by the earth-
worms and the fungi.
See the feet and faces of the garden’s firs, see them
borrow the carbons and
proteins from broken
bird bodies - and become
bird, featherless, glideless,
hushed, infinitely useful, jade-leafed
half-bird moleculed, chimerally skinned,
feathered infinitesimally between bark-cell and
bark-cell, and inside, the soft stringy wood and soft
stringy heart muscle is kin, beating, mollified by quietude
into slow mumphs, numb throbs.


-Rae

Make Me

(Found lines are from "Othello", Joni Mitchell, and Tanith Lee)

It is the cause.

It is the cause, my soul. It is

the cause.

Let me not name it to you

O God,

who makes of me a bird.

The fire saint, She

makes the fire

burn.

It is saint fire.

O God make me a stone

so that I might not

burn.

It is the cause.

Please. O

God make me…

the fire saint, O

it is the cause.

She makes the fire burn.

Saint Fire, O

a stone make me O

fire saint, let me not name it

to you, O

make the fire burn,

my soul. A bird—

Please

O God, make me a bird of stone so I won’t burn. It is the cause, my soul. It is

the cause.

~Jess D.