for Artie
The plane to Charlotte is late
and the gate won’t open
for air. Lights pass in the sky,
and one must be the twinkle
in your eye. Travelers hold
little mirrors in their hands, without
reflection, unaware the massive
amount of breathing in this place,
all of us existing in a box
until the mask on a mouth
can’t save us, and more than a plane
goes down. Without notice.
Without time to reach for the hand
in the next seat over. I’m stuck
at this gate between here and there,
just waiting, counting breaths,
while you so quietly moved on.
– Beth Williams
Author’s Note: This poem started when I received a phone call that a friend had died. I was waiting at the gate for my plane and wasn’t able to embrace my emotions at the time.…
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Through the window
you’re a deer aligning
with the house’s dense shadow,
a trajectory of my mind
shaping a path to the heavens.
You’re an offering under
the dying grass moon,
every vessel and no body,
a cracked spire
in the wheat-eyed sky.
I look for you in the constellations
of Artemis; I don’t look for you at all.
The mysteries of death
bore me most; I am interested
in the body’s slow refusal to listen,
the final scrim of heat rising,
imminent.
– Angela Sundstrom
Author’s Note: This poem is from my recently completed chapbook, Where the Waters Still. This collection contains work exploring grief, loss, and the body, often through a mythological lens. …
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Worrying, as I listened
to rain take care of itself
outside my walls and curtained windows,
about money,
I was awake,
but I lay still. I’d like to say
that rain dropped down from the indifferent universe,
but, though
the sound of rain couldn’t hear me,
I seemed to matter,
I, myself, seemed
to grow the wealth I needed, while on healthy trees…
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Dear Suki: Winter, Hanoi, 40’s,
I alone knew how everywhere
was dark plaiting through salt-
plume, dearing your thousand
griefs into buds, tinsel-winged
upon the tails of December sun.
You freckled seeking over earth,
keening quiet cries with caress
smooth from my slight of turn,
wrist to radius stretching there
to everything you had loved that
remained seam-like, straight to
the end of memory. Ten weeks,
they had said, ten weeks to fall
from still stone steps for vertigo,
descending hazy as though each
limb prostrate in nocturne, your
mouth lotus-bulbed on my finger-
tips to a stunning death of petals.
– Lana Bella…
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In semblance of brittleness it stands
still
unbowed, dry
reedy rod rising
to burry crown revealing nothing
even to breezes that demand
it speak forth its cadence of parched crackles
still it stands
confronting crisp winter
staring in its bleak eye the season
bent on bringing down lesser, larger limbs
unfit to bear the strain of snow
still rigid
unhostile in plain acceptance—
this is being
this is nothing more than being—
its implied dare
reach, seize, snap
hints at the plunderer’s fate
the bloodied hands
forced open in the attack
– Katy Scrogin
Author’s Note: The poem emerged out of a workshop sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Chicago’s Lurie Garden. We were studying how the garden changed over the course of the year, and I was taken in by the plant know as the rattlesnake master.…
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I mean you encase my head in your marble, wishing you could uncarve me back into you. I don’t get the same maydays the birds do. By the time the canary is up, you are the cracking of eggshell against the dome of our asphyxiating house. You become your name. A burning tar-colored voice fills my eyes, my ears. Your aneurysm. My altar, barely courage-high, wedges itself between you and your striking. I tell her to run. I always tell her to run.
– Auden Eagerton…
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Dear Suki, Carmel, April 23rd, 68′,
I visited you in California when I
missed us from that postcard to no
where here. It began that way, noon
lent itself into the footsteps of two
thousand miles set there by waters,
I crunched of gravel with long shot
to the sea in your embrace so tight.
Dearest girl, I hoped to say what I
want when the road turned to sand,
when I liked things simple from all
the ways you had done and scented
back, surfacing me. Decades still
would find me there, in the quiet of
your mint vexing mouth, giving for
what we have been without missing
us gently through handshakes and
apologies, making relief of our ghosts.
– Lana Bella…
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