The body’s tense shoulder, its skin in a slip
with its mouth full of ribbons ––
How it sways with rain.
Slow coming on, the low horn –– same, same.
The stammering squeal of rail and wheel rising,
the face framed in reflection ––
The flash in the retina ––
A scattering, clouds, etcetera ––
The exit and smell of wet steel, the perforating flash
of white woods –– the elongated cry of the cat ––
the mind’s relent, gather, slack ––
Its penchant for rain ––
– Bevil Townsend
Author’s Note: This poem, among others, is an elegy for my late father and they come from a longer manuscript, Birdsong and Buckshot: An Elegiac Echo. I worked to construct these mellifluous poems through both traditional and invented forms to echo the bodily constraints the speaker experiences here in the physical world.…
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I
Did he not see?
that my stars were piqued by other starry fires
and I was chalking up
tediously
the hands of would-be ghosts,
that I was reaching for
the crags that would harden
my knuckles with shame
for my fear
my inaction out of fear,
my lack of art.
II
Little pine needles
scrape the arches
of my feet
in my inadequate shoes
He told me how to wear shoes properly,
bought me a good pair
and I’m sorry I sold them
I couldn’t I just couldn’t
and I’m sorry, you now, that I couldn’t bring myself
to teach you the same …
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Hot air balloons can only crash—
it took me fifteen years and five thousand
miles to watch nylon
candies en flambé
fall like parade castoffs
from the sky. In open fields, hands
sticky with crepe drippings, the lot of us
craned our necks and clutched our phones
waiting with hungry impatience
for the cascade of exquisite collisions.
– Jessica Mehta…
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The new moon came in with the stormy weather
and washed everything so clean, all that is left to do
is to cling to the brightness of a future
we’ve never seen.
And the past, pulling on hopeful
bodies like a puppet master reminding us who we have yet to
forgive, telling us to hold on when we should let go, keeping us
in fear of the unknown.
I reach for you in the dark and hope that you reciprocate.
I run until my feet are sore to warn you like Eve in the garden
wishing only to share with a partner, not to be blamed for eternity.
But you resist.
– Tejan Green…
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It is 1980 my father is high on cocaine.
He is a man unfaithful even to his own sadness.
–
(there was a machine I was involved in it it gave me a diamond I gave it the heart of a palm it thundered and groaned like a moss-covered god)
–
It is 1980
we are among
my wife’s dead
hanging flowers
and I am
Cocaine.…
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I carry
clothing & food
downstairs
across the river
to another compartment
in the sky
an offshoot
a sequel
I lie
carrying still
anger waiting
an excavation in the future
on the bed you turn
glowing blue-lit
then
mouth wide open
face to the ceiling
mouth kissed by others
nameless
in dark places
I wonder
if we’d met at another time
would this be severed
could we laugh then
& throw each other
knowing glances
never touching
we would lie
at separate ends
of the sofa at the party
its end closing in
– Joe Sullivan…
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they huddle in the doorway
of a dark abandoned building,
smoking what might
be a cigarette,
beneath shreds
of blankets
goodwill coats
and cardboard.
we pass as the light
moves on from red
to the green
of seaglass caught
in sun,
and they
do not watch
as we pass
from their lives
so freely,
as if there were
more
worlds than one.
– Thomas Higgins…
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