~inspired by George Mason’s “The Harvest Moon,” 1877
Harvest moon glares, jagged from clouds grinding
their glazed edges against her.
Harvest moon bleeds in colors of oak & maple,
her face round as a hazel leaf.
Landscape burns in a blur of garnet & tangerine
peppered with people & dogs
& scythes.
Landscape drowns in bellowing & howling
& the hiss of metal crescents
against grains.
Frayed cats slink over blades & between
the pauses in lusty laughter.
Frayed cats patrol this field of autumn’s
benediction—fleshy broth
of limb & spine & belly.
– t.m. thomson…
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I think I was naive envisioning aliens
as somehow native to the aerial realm.
They are like us
probably belted to a crater
with its own share of showers and sorrows.
Aliens also must’ve done the aerodynamic calculations
necessary for metal to become airborne
flying machines produced by a foreign science.
Surely, they understand that asteroids blaze
at a certain rate, a fraction of one alien unit to another.
Otherwise, how could they enter our orbit?
– Lillian Tzanev…
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My mother’s patience
looks like
a flower bed,
practiced fingers
dipping into the earth
with each seed
between forefinger
and thumb.
Weeks of coaxing
and water push
new plants
into the world,
blossoms swaying
in the breeze. …
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I know the wavelength of soft grasses in
eastern winds. Fireflies blink in the
balloon of a sundress, and when I set
the table and forget the napkin, you
capture and pin me as a fraud.
But I know trees sound like oceans
in the shadow of a new moon.
July is fresh bronzed and unconditioned
fed with berries and barbecues, summer
vacations of lasers in the eye and sore
spines, and you dare to question
what I am worth?
It’s July—I am a statue housing
a robin’s nest in my elbow and the warmth
of my parents in my chest.
Taking up space, in debt to field mice
incapable of trapping.
Do not call yourself comfortable to imply
that I am not.
– Leah Skay
…
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My daughter always looks up.
She’s bored of what we’ve got here on land
even when we’re somewhere nice, beautiful actually.
She lies on the blanket and refuses to look at anything but up.
Our stay at Lake Burns has been simple, well-deserved.
The other kids laugh and cry but my daughter sits quietly.
Jane says I should be grateful for this rare version of motherhood. I miss Jane.
– Lillian Tzanev…
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offers me a map of the forest
leads me through it in a sandpaper suit
where each tree seems to know a different language
the ground grows spongy, sinks and then drops away
just roots and rocks and odd dark pools
and the hawthorn bristles in broad Scots:
each berry o’ mine is a planet
and lower: this wood is not for you.
An ash-tree is a great silver-green god
but all the gods are dying
black-tipped stems only show
once the rot has the trunk.
Greensands, gault and kimmeridge clay.
No compass points, there’s no signal
the map leads us both scrambling
from one low ferned branch to another
tall black cypresses whisper in Occitan
the maples in maybe Croatian
slippery leaf-mould and hart’s-tongue ferns
foxgloves fringe a clearing
round a huge service-tree
in autumn crimson and hung with bletting fruit.…
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The doctor points to my beating heart
on the ultrasound screen like I should know
by sight whether that dark, wet shape
looks healthy. Outside, the sun disappears.
I passed the people wearing polymer glasses
on my drive to the hospital. When the pain
started, I pissed myself. The doctor assures me
I’ve got a strong ticker. This, she implies,
is despite my choices. My hunger,
my bird-bones, my body unable to bleed each month.
I used to be a real person, I whisper, watching
the squelching heart speed up.
I kissed girls & ate cheese fries & ran
beside the Monongahela River & believed
I would see multiple eclipses, in my lifetime,
long as it would surely be.
– Megan Williams…
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