NOON 26
NOO N:
Journal of
the
Short Poem Issue 26 September 2024
lifting off the nest edge fog
after death new items trickling into the in box
Bill Cooper
Schwerin unhoused they keep building more snowmen
carousel girl never tires of waving goodbye, hello
my daughter at the airport waving goodbye friendship bracelets made of straws
Eating beans out of the pot
socks hung to dry from the curtain rods like roosting bats
playing the lute late in bed with the cat
waking with absence held in my arms
the last few cicadas choose me me me me me
Robert MacLean
on safari that vast part of me
folding to sleep I become four-legged
matinee two hours inside someone else’s rain
My life a rage of thirst slaked by drought
When my father died, I had to pick him up and carry him
One day I hope to put him down
stepping on my shadow bereavement handshakes
GONE
The trampoline was gone from his front garden. Birds and lizards gathered in fading sun on the dead grass. Somewhere else, surely, rusty springs creaked and the boy was still singing, bounces being counted, random questions flung at passers-by about dates of birthdays and what was on the menu for tea. When the loss registered the suburb spun.
In her head, over and over, up and down, the painting of a black-faced lamb, asleep beside a spinning globe a child’s drawing pinned to a forest wall a single plume of cloud in a peacock sky, a dream voice murmuring that birds must wear watches from beneath a haystack of sleep.
Jane Frank
AMONG the choices this morning three crows strong black tea that memory you shoved so far back in a closet you no longer trust any mirror nor stop sign
BLEACH
It would be perfectly fine to bleach my life till now. To scour myself back to some raw wound smelling of Toilet Duck and panty liners; a clean linoleum floor shone with Windolene. I’d reflect the sun and nothing else and accept no feet.
WHAT IS FAKE WHAT IS REAL
After Blade Runner, Warner Bros., 1982
The shimmering scale found in the bathtub; the grainy feel of soap between fingers held up to the light like a glass filling with blood.
Wes Lee
GHOSTED
Nothing in the mailbox but wasps.
GETTING BACK TOGETHER
She pricked at my splinter with a needle heated red holding my finger steady in her hand not letting go till she got it all.
PANDEMIC HAMMERING
Love songs by dead people play. Snow blows sideways across the window. I pound one nail in one wall and consider what to hang.
MIDNIGHT WALK
I’d lie in the snow and let the cold take me but I am wearing my nice coat.
THAT ONE CROW carrying like a knife a skim of inlet ice
little poem what are you doing filling the horizon?
with my son watching rain fall into the ocean
in the blink an eye
from WELLFLEET JOURNAL, CAPE COD
4. Notes on the Way to a Beach
That marsh still holds the time we held.
* Backroad forest of dead bony pitch pine and one wren singing on a skeleton.
* Raccoon family also crossing the bike path heading toward the beach.
*
Fern wings bob in rain, spider tightens her rigging, the green ship sails on.
* Finally sun burning striations of ocean fog strewn as bled veins
as the ocean sounds in our blood a red dog in the waves.
David Giannini
two strangers untangling the dog leashes between them
Alan Yan
packed subway car quantum relationships forming, ending
after agreeing we have nothing in common mutual orgasm
George Swede
the sky writhing with cirrus intortus a June divorce
Alan Summers
cracked earth between us stanzas of dead air
patterns in the white noise the moon’s afterlife
abandoned garden spindrift snow counterclockwise
Lev Hart home blown to at the keyboard pieces she composes herself
shaped stone block
hernia truss
the cathedral completely imagined
rained in as if we could be other than we are
Evan
Vandermeer
POEM
Balasore, India, June 2, 2023
“What have I done that my flower has turned into a charcoal?” asked a father, his eyes passing from the face of his son, becalmed, as if sleeping, to the boy’s charred body beside the mangled train car.
An utterance and detail so visceral that, reading about the wreck, I touch my cheek, the boy’s face in my mind’s eye luminous, lighting the blackened flesh of the body.
Then, as suddenly, the image of a lamp extinguished inside a locked room.
PRELUDES
Before breakfast, my mother wants to discuss what I should play on the cello at her funeral. I opt for a long walk alone by the river, to mull over the possibilities.
A small bunch of wildflowers tied loosely to a commemorative bench
Walled reservoirs on the other side of the river – the splash of oars
A boat named Nirvana, tied to a jetty
Torn between G major and D minor – the crunch of my tread on the path
Philip Rowland
thrilling to the spontaneous lectures on plant archeology from the watery-eyed, widowed gardener
asking me to repeat what she just said
It’s true – in finding the words, you find the world underway. But what happens when what happened is a thing one cannot say, where what is lost is loss itself re-enacted in the quotidian fray?
Alan Botsford
Scott Metz on the fallen trees cover ed in sno ow un cover ed the s had ow s of snow
DEWA SANZAN
dragonflies, and prayer slips circling in the water
the monk blesses us with a smoker’s cough
sunburst through the clouds obscuring the peak on the skilift our skitips brush grasstips
silent steps of settled snow on cedar branches
we drove, accidentally, to the summit
keeping the sky on both sides stone fences in Ireland
growing up the side of our mountain we never see
Gary Hotham
autumn path the motion parallax of memories
Christopher Patchel
ENDGAME
She danced. No formality to it, a spontaneous act, the passage undefined but the steps within it with a definite rhythm to them, excited, as though the eye had just alighted on the open space that marks the exit from a maze.
Young
fever dream . . . i draw her a street map of the town we’d moved to
a p hywel
TRANSWOMAN RETREATS TO A PLACE THOUGHT
POPULAR OFF BOURBON STREET
If I gaze toward the end of the barroom most in need of light a recently emptied and stranded shotglass holds a strayed hornet that will go airborne again if I can furrow the crowd to swirl the fading ice and pitch the watery mix into the funk of the sweat-rhythmed street
I know she may yet survive breaking moonlight over her wings.
DIVING EVENTS
New ways to fall.
THOUGHT
“I wonder whether you feel – because I do –That consciousness can’t be a stream. Instead It seeps up from below to fill a kind of well. Thought floods into a space that hasn’t been Prepared for it.”
“Well . . .”
SOCIAL CONTRACT SONNET
The heart forms around a primordial void like two empty chairs facing each other.
HOW MEMORIES ECHO SONNET
In the weeds a rusted bicycle bell silent as that t in French class.
a
mandala of autumn leaves
ze puts hir coloured pencils away
Danny Blackwell streets i once knew atrophied you
shipyard cranes loom over mountains the stories we tell
Ross Moore
A POEM FOR CREATORS
Behind the moon –nomadic spirits, derelict satellites, and God in paint-spattered overalls.
By way of the concept of negative space your not knowing what everyone else knows gives birth to the person you are.
Mark Terrill
John Cage hovered backstage for four minutes and thirty-three seconds listening to the audience inexactly listening
Sheila E. Murphy