Category: Poetry

It starts like threading yarn in a needle threading the vein
turning red pulling vocal cord blood and muscle

the things that grow in you like algae
blooming on a lake as blue as agate or turquoise—

do you want to be that lake? Maybe the granite beneath
it? The pull of iron the streams turning to rust?

You become flotsam on the shore:
driftwood pine needles blush herb and sunrise gore…

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I wrap them like fine china in layers
of old newspapers and bubble wrap
andstill I know that the moving man

will drop the box or hit a pothole
on that bad stretch of road heading
out of town and something will crack.

All spring I have watched song
sparrows readying their nest in the rotting
crotch of a birch tree, laying in twigs

and leaves and feathers, lacing it up
withstring pulled from the canvas
deck chairs, only to have the arborist…

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More than a stirring, more than a rag soaked in gasoline, these nights in the streets are about need.

It all gets televised, and television is about something else: a box or a flattened box, a profound stillness masquerading as movement.

No Future becomes a slogan, and then we move on. We live the No.

A billion smaller boxes. Little coffins for ideas.

There’ll be time enough for mindlessness. A spoon and a melting lawn gnome.

I want to inject my cell phone. Smart drugs. Traffic cones. Dunce caps. Safety orange. Blaze orange. 

We gorge on that which muddies up the blood.

– Glen Armstrong…

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I expected to return and find the house
collapsed on itself in my absence.
But I came back,
half as beaten down as before but still unwhole,
and found nothing changed,
all the way down to the dust bunnies
in the corner of the stairs.
I spent days and weeks before this one bracing myself,
building up my walls
where they had started to crumble away.
I placed a bucket in my hand
to bail myself back into the hole
I thought I created in my hurried exit
but found no such thing.
Nothing could have prepared me
for the amount of inaction needed.
I had prepared a grand re-opening.
and no one came.
I’ve never been good at adjusting
and readjusting,
the arranging
and rearranging.…

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I want to write
———dirty poetry;
——————you heard right.

Words that aren’t gold
———because they’re too busy
——————grinding against the dirt.

I’ve been yearning
———to live
——————beyond the poverty

sticking to my palms.
———I shredded my diary
——————at seventeen,

tried to silence
———the frenzy of youth.
——————I’ve been pulling away  

at strands in my verses,
———combing out
——————the glitter.

I want to be honest
———I may have traded
——————God for poetry

wanting / to make / love.

– Claudia Rojas…

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Orville,
what did we just see?
I look at my brother.
He looks at me.

Mirrors of wonder,
much more than a disbelief.
We look back up to the sky
and want more.

This awe feels right.
Despite no wings, this is
humankind’s dream, as if
commanded and given,

as if bestowed from heaven.
And look at us.
So much can happen
when we just believe.

– Joe Bisicchia…

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To go back to last week
____and tell my subway self it is ok to make
________eye contact: the eyes of the terrified

beseech. If only I had smiled at her,
____introduced myself (never mind the stutter),
________made that self-deprecating joke

I’ve been saving, then maybe she
____would’ve laughed and caused eyes
________to flit up and dart around, and the

musician next to her could’ve
____added his two cents, and she might’ve
________pointed to his saxophone, and perhaps

he would’ve begun to play, and surely the
____other passengers would’ve stared and chuckled
________and clapped until the hurtling hearse filled with

________music and movement and touch and dance—

I am on the ‘L’ now, departing for downtown, and
____cannot hear the violinist playing against the station walls,
________unnoticed, to the left of the descending stairs.…

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