Poetry

Brown Skin, Sin, (compassion)

4,000 Newton’s Will snap your femur And mine. Lives? Hold any close Like-kin. So one says, Stomp and hold One knee to one chest? Is this the best Humanity can serve? So for you, The skin we ware Ain’t always what we choose. Never there a choice. THEREFORE: claim privilege? We did not choose a costume; Random skin. DNA like tidal swirls; Chromosomes link or are undone. I am undone. Your adrenaline hatred. Your scorn for brown skin. Your stump dumb prejudice. Call me Buddha. Come Mohammad Where are you Christ? If the brown baby cried; Would you feed it Like a breast? 4000 Newton’s Of pressure will break Your femur or mine. A feather weight breaks mine. A knee decimates

—Jason S. Davis

The Delivery

The UPS driver delivered a boxful of my new book. I gave him one. “You’re a writer?” he said. “No,” I said. “I’m a poet.” “Oh, is there a difference?” he said. “Yes, writers write to be understood. Poets write to be remembered,” I said. “Well, I’ll remember you,” he said. “Good,” I said. “Also it couldn’t hurt to understand what you remember.” “Got it,” he said.

The Pros and Cons of Cigarettes

Musical accompaniment: Haydn string quartet in C minor op. 17 no. 4 movement 4.

When you’re young, they’re something new— they give your hands a task to do; and, then, you’re looking so mundane— just add a top hat and a cane; they buzz a person pretty fast— five minutes in, you’re flabbergast. Sure, drinking hits you more profound but not as quick, just ask around; the soothing of the nerves, also the analytical gusto; they keep your concentration strong, your train of thought they will prolong; at least that’s how it goes at first— it don’t take long to get immersed. Besides to help you concentrate, they’re efficacious to lose weight; suppressing appetites sure hooks some people hung up on their looks; and, then, there are folks who lean t’ward just having smokes because they’re bored; which is another way to say they need `em to get through the day. They give you something of a break and maybe help you stay awake; but when you’re older you’re aware tobacco’s not so debonair; the repetition does infer it’s rather an empty succor; and then there is the vulgar smell you qualify under its spell; it’s true they help to calm you down but notice how your teeth are brown; your skin’s sallow and leathery— you don’t exude salubrity. To get addicted to a plant is rather most inelegant; sure, it was lots of fun at first but now the fun feels all coerced; and every year it’s harder still to get your breath to move uphill. You know they’re going to kill you soon and that will be inopportune; look at the mucus you eject— it’s unrefined if left unchecked; your lungs are gasping from the strain— that smoking, sir, is quite the bane!

—Wortley Clutterbuck

Yellow Stave

I am the knowledge of the experience of my awareness The shadow ahead is the light behind I am the tree that shadows life

Self Medication

Often it appears as a slight inflammation, insignificant. Yet the attention is drawn. Even though you know better to leave it, you just have to pick until it becomes really sore. One day you wake; she’s gone to seek a second opinion.

—Clifford Henderson

Rubber Band

I like a certain type of rubber band, with a band that’s thick and square-shaped. Only the tan ones. They come in boxes with rubber band dust, and then hang above my sink. Not circles, or anything really, shape indistinct, they give you… freedom, and limitation; expansion, and a place to come home. I want love like my rubber bands.

—Anna Keville Joyce

Man Song

Some plants seed in autumn, And some in the spring.

We seed where life takes us, But often in dreams.

It takes but a glance, “Yes, my coffee with cream.”

But the moment passes, Leaves lost in a stream.

—James Lichtenberg

When It Was Winter/The Egg of Potential/ For the Good Man in My Life, Whoever You Are

I was just a bunch of bare branches camouflaged by the hides of hemlock and doug fir and even my own detritus. I was a withered trunk that you trekked to and sought out my secret bounty. You slid your hand up and down I am Born Daily

the grain of my chilly bark and fingered between the splits until I felt a heartbeat. and turned my sap into syrup. You sucked my sugar into your mouth and were satiated by my sweetness. Stop. This poem isn’t about sex. This poem is about self-love ourselves-love This poem is about you cracking my egg of potential that I’d been afraid to hatch.

—Paula Dutcher

Reflection

You stuck a tap in me Into My Own Arms, From the Womb of Yesterday, And Delivered to The Handmaiden of Tomorrow. Who am I then To Speculate On Reincarnation?

—Bob Grawi

After Rain

You are the kind of color and smell to sew bells on, so when you grow distant, I’ll know— even from under the blankets— that it’s time to start the chase.

—Adriana Stimola

Imagining His World

lying there listening to his labored breathing now saddened to think of the time when it will stop then smiling to hear his floorboard scratching all legs twitching in full muffled barking pursuit and wondering what creatures he can be chasing in his exhilaratingly exhausting dreamworld game watching him later as he rests at driveway’s end trying to imagine how he knows to patiently wait for the time his small friends take their daily walk curious to comprehend why well into his old age he still finds so much comfort in the stuffed toys that he proudly offers to us when we return home or uses for his pillows on stone floors or soft rugs or sneaks outside on walks to show off his domain before absently dropping under some tree or bush trying to picture his life shared with others before us that compels him to block the way when you vacuum or bark crazily when family now playfully hug or kiss or anxiously paces waiting each evening homecoming measured minutes and miles from my journey’s end hoping that all the memories he seems to still hold stay alive in him in the other world that he will enter when that final sleep puts to rest his labored breaths

Bleed Into My Boy

This is my son I draw him a bit darker today

I press hard on the pen and feel the weight and watch the ink

bleed into my boy

I draw him and I press hard because I think on him

I love on him every day

I watch the ink play through his hair dripping into tiny locks

dreaded

What is this my fair son twelve and bigger each day

I can feel a new firmness in his back when we wrestle

I think on this sketch this darker sketch of my boy carried into our lighter town

he’s chasing a friend across a neighbor’s yard

How hard do I press the pen before my boy is a threat and not a friend

—James Christopher Carroll

Mother

his small hands grabbed at birds and bugs without the grace to understand the delicacy of their spines as they struggled free and she watched him apologizing, with her eyes, for all the things in life that would escape him and make his world not his

—Sophia V Paffenroth