Category: Poetry

when you came home that afternoon
they did not let me see you immediately.
i guess because you may have been covered
in ash, fear
fragments, blood that did not belong to you
but that is only a guess. the face you wore
was not unlike your usual but every corner
was turned down and all the lines in your skin
seemed more like canyons than cracks.
…

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Let go of the willing captives. The reborn followers.
Even the cruelest deserve to know you don’t exist.
Bring forth the freedom made by your absence.
Make a promise and keep it. Take this cup of truth
and drink from it. Swish this salt of surrender inside
your mouth. Multiply skeptics far and wide. Flood
newfound wisdom across these deserts
of prayer. Oh, Lord, like a good hero, ride your horse
into that sunset and never turn back.

– Aidan Chafe

Author’s Note: “Prayer in the Age of Unreason” came about because of my current obsession with Judeo-Christian mythology. I was reading poetry from Jericho Brown and Katie Ford, as well as non-fiction and essays from Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. The combination became a tonic for me writing about religion.…

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I walked to the foot of a clock tower.  It was the end
of a ghost town, light filtering through dull windows,
birds turning their heads from their makeshift roosts.

A woman in a trench coat hurried to the top of the stairs,
hush, hush, her footsteps, the rain outside, a winter storm.
The blue made the birds seem breakable, the clock still—

everything else was darkness, not a click but a shudder,
which served as an explanation that even the perceptible
needs to be reminded of itself.  The woman might have said

come with me, but I couldn’t tell.  Not that I would have known
what to say. Sometimes my eyes are more
clever than a kaleidoscope, like a voice at the top of a stairwell

which says don’t you remember what could’ve been?…

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I wailed at the cruelty
when the bi-planes felled him.
Learning then that man, malarial man,
buzzing round the wonder of the great ape like mosquitoes,
would kill us all.

I was Faye, entombed in the leathery digits of Kong,
a font of youth and tears and love, and I was also Kong,
the humanity in his gentled placid eyes when he clutches her,
his brackish rage; part righteous part misguided. …

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I roll the last three peaches beneath my hands,
testing them for water. Watercolor fuzz tickles,
curls away beneath the paring knife. Here

I find the peach pit clinging
like an unready soul
to its flesh, wishing to bring along
riches stored in fibers.

There is another, floating free
within its body. A curve of steel
reaches the center and the pit rolls out,
cordial and without complaint. It is ready.

My hand curls around the very last, blade
easing through softness. My fingers find—
when the fruit is cut away—a third stone
cleaved in two. I think it saw the world
from within its cocoon.

The shock split it clean.

– Teresa Morse

Author’s Note: I find that my poetry tends to land me in small places, allowing me to dignify the unseen or rarely seen.…

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from the patio, my body
twinges, your hands pressed to the glass
of the sliding door, our marriage much like this
when you see the minor injury that will take me
many weeks to overcome, the irritation more
than the pain, and I see it
in your eyes, the injury that will take us
away from ourselves, the way the glass door
keeps us apart, the way the leaves are drained
from the wheelbarrow into the empty field not far enough
from the house to stop the wind from spilling them back
into our lives like the tissue that grows, both ornamental
and necessary, over wounds.

– David Swerdlow…

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The sirens scream, and I am drowned
by Los Angeles memories—
a flood of people
hunters, prowling rapists,
drive-by babies
bleeding in cradles,
kids hop-scotching Hollywood
stars, barbed-wire high schools
with penitentiary views,
mothers sleeping
under overpasses, drinking
freeway smog while the night
halo rises. I sink down below
into the pass, the canyon, the valley,
as tumbleweeds snag
on marooned car hulls
and bonfire piers are whipped
by Devil Winds.
There is no river here, I remind myself,
no reason to fear cavitation,
no crossing boatman,
only a cemented trickle
tattooed by graffiti bridges,
turbines stealing snowmelt, pushing
it over snared bodies. Only time locks
dribbling out showers, dams anchoring
drinking fountains. The Queen
of the Angels may mourn
the Tujunga watershed
and Santa Ana sucker,
but I fear a storm
on the mountain, drowning
in a shimmering current
backwater that screams my name.…

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