by Gemma Cooper-Novack
by Milla van der Have
Saints here are everywhere
but they're strange ones, give or take
—their names barely familiar
their miracles mostly unheard of
their creed whetted on sea-crested hills
and a promise of salt.—
They group the walls of the chapels and
draw the faithful in long black droves,
carrying food and their sunday smiles,
as they trickle in like prayer beads
one by one, to the repetitive
kyrie eleison and the sweet strokes
of incense and petals.
They linger in old stones, the holy ones,
their eyes cast always on the heavens
as if scrutinizing a great canvas
that may yet reveal the secrets of liberation,
the one art they couldn't master.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Milla van der Have (The Netherlands, 1975) is a Gemini. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, Otis Nebula, and Ninth Letter among others. She's the author Ghosts of Old Virginny (Aldrich Press), a chapbook about Virginia City, Nevada. Milla lives and works in Utrecht, The Netherlands with her wife and two rabbits (that occasionally appear in her poems).
by Veronica Kornberg
—After Ada Limón
All that birdsong in the winter scrub,
wrentit and fox sparrow, drab towhee
under cover of green tongues—
coyote mint and wild lilac.
Listening, you say
it’s like the sound of thinking.
Or camouflage, I say,
the earth
masking its secret music.
Now we hear the freeway
hum in the distance
and I remember
our walk on the salt flats
in Death Valley, the silence
there,
huge and physical, pressing
so we heard nothing
but
our heartbeats,
stood listening
with our bodies
to our bodies,
the rivers braiding inside us, two
creatures under a wallop of sky.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Veronica Kornberg is a poet based in Pescadero, California. Recipient of the 2018 Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and Crab Creek Review, among other journals. See more at veronicakornberg.com.
by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
“We will not allow the building of anything on bones of people.”
Governor Alexander Rogachuk, Belarus, DailyMailUK,
“Mass grave containing 1,000 executed Jewish men, women,
and children uncovered”
see all two-hundred
& seventy bones found at birth
in a single body. Multiply each
by a thousand, ten-thousand,
hundred-thousand, million
by the millions. Magnitude
past numbers, beyond
bodies. We don’t know how
to know such things.
We try to take them
in our hands. Sift the soil
we let our children
build on, palming dirt
into their open mouths.
Wash their hands of it.
Scrub under the nails.
We still can’t clean
what gets inside.
Show me a place
not made of bone
& see the generations
we have swallowed.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her second collection, Don’t Touch the Bones, won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize (Lost Horse Press, March 2020). 40 WEEKS, written while pregnant with her now 4-month-old daughter, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. The editor of Construction Magazine, Julia holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
by Catherine Staples
What kind of life is the pine leading now—
not Lear on the heath or Richard in the tower.
Is it my father’s life at the end of life?
The slowed-down heartbeat of a northern bear,
slumbers broken by sharp waking, eyes
wide with the self that resides within?
When lightning struck our white pine, a fissure
halved her, rain of needles in our neighbor’s
pool—her verdant green gone rust-red.
Without a crown, her rough beauty undone,
the tree men scaled her to a high stump.
Confined, she’s nothing like herself.
Her long roots radiate across the yard.
She roams like a mad starfish under the earth,
some roots surface, hard as sea ropes with salt.
They tip above the lawn, nearly trip me
as I head out with peels of beet to feed
the compost. Teabags, carrots, winter’s
kindling for the next season’s feast: a butternut
fattens under a canopy, a fig brings bees
and elephantine leaves. All morning, windfall
into the hearth, I watch it blaze a torrent
of words, a snow-white semblance.
Singe of lichen spackles a fallen branch.
The fire keeps. My father sleeps upright
in his chair, I wake him with the oldest stories.
First the scuffed blue rowboat, then the beetle-cat.
Four of us scrapping for holds on the tiller,
my brother alive, the hair in his eyes.
Wind picks up offshore, our centerboard hums.
Hard-to-lee, hairsbreadth to the channel,
all we’d never know flying beneath us.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Catherine Staples is the author of two poetry collections: The Rattling Window, winner of the McGovern Prize, and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and The Academy of American Poets at poets.org. New work is forthcoming at Copper Nickle and Gettysburg Review. Honors include a Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize. She teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.
by Heidi Seaborn
~with a nod to Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, and Sharon Olds
The poet calls you estrogen kitchen.
But I call you galley.
Another christens you graceful lyre.
Liar. I call you liar.
A third poet calls you her sweet weight.
Wait, I call you. Wait.
Hold this sweet thing, please. Just wait
a minute. Just wait.
She names you soil of the fields,
says, “Welcome roots.” I say
rotting compost, fallopian stone.
Keep your bloody promise: anchor
my creation in your muddy
harbor. Let it moor for the winter.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Heidi Seaborn is Editorial Director of The Adroit Journal and author of the debut collection Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019) and the chapbook Finding My Way Home (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review, and Tar River. She’s currently an NYU MFA candidate.
by Val Dering Rojas
So this is what we amount to:
a commonplace silence
and a damage that is spectacular,
the Santa Ana fueling
an obscene dawn.
Say we awoke
to the awareness
of our teeth
inside our skulls
inside our skin,
how every burning blue oak
distills to ash-leaf,
how nature's intuition
provides for flight—
to say that there is nothing left
of us would be a lie,
but what to call everything else,
except omission?
Right now, 100-degree heat,
and our universe is glowing.
My instinct is never reliable:
the bitter cherry
undressing
until the bitter end.
The most beautiful skies
are made from disaster,
and here I am.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Val Dering Rojas is a Los Angeles-based poet and artist who has also studied addiction and recovery counseling and psychology. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Right Hand Pointing, among others. Val is also the author of the chapbooks Ten (dancing girl press) and Waspfish (glass lyre press).
by Brenda Miller
—for J.
contains Eros, god of love, cupid’s
arrow piercing unexpectedly—
perhaps that’s what we’re in for:
think of St Theresa, God’s arrows
stabbing at all angles until the body surrenders.
Look: not pain, not pleasure, not the rumble
of hunger or desire. Would we call it joy?
This nipping away of the crust?
With J. we watched her body shrink for six months,
Growing light for the flight, we said
as J. got quieter, all her sharp corners gone.
She sorted greetings on the hospice bed, vast
accumulation of empty
Christmas cards, birthday, sympathy.
I guess I could send myself a card, she chortled,
saying ‘sorry you’re dead.’ She had bags and bags
of Cheetos, quarts of Ginger Ale, pictures of Jesus
elbowing Stars of David, striped socks,
polka dots. At the end, her body barely touched
the sheets, her raspy laugh an echo,
skin so thin, erased.
Think of the sand dunes in Oregon,
or the calving ice of Glacier Bay.
Think gnawing, the way a dog will
wear away a bone, or a termite
the foundation of your home.
Something is whole, and then it’s not.
Find a pattern in the cliffside,
rivulets, divots, and wrinkles
in your mother’s face. Feel it happening
even now: the love of a sandstorm,
or a zephyr, carting away, bit
by bit, all evidence
of a life already done.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections, including An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016). She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (Third Edition published 2019) and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her poetry has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet, Bellevue Literary Review, Fusion, and Psaltery & Lyre. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes.
by Martha Silano
You can be a good girl and not know it.
You can have a memory of a man-
made lake named Thunderbird.
You can be ten, driving in the back
of your uncle’s Triumph, listening
to Santana’s “Evil Ways,” a song
about a lady who’s got to change, the singer
getting tired, feeling like a clown.
This can’t go on on a highway to Luzerne,
the hill to grandma and gramps’ house,
a bulging water tower like a giant troll
where we found the fossil of a fern,
where I fell in love with a boy
who enlisted in the Marines.
In love with a soldier? For a day I was.
I was a good girl who had to say it:
I love? you, my voice rising because
I was shy but couldn’t stop myself.
Years later my grandma shared photos
of Kevin in uniform, a row of metals
crowding his chest. There he was,
and there I’d been with him and gramps,
at the edge of the woods to pick boletes.
Kevin, my one-day boyfriend. Evil ways?
Why did I love that song so much?
It was a big hit. WABC played it
on the hour. That opening drum solo!
Still sounds like the day I first heard it.
Everything yellows, wormholes,
is bulldozed under at a dump. Entropy reigns
everywhere except on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora.
Now we call it streaming. Could there be
a better word? Stepping into the same river
twice. Not quite all in flux. Flowing,
yet static. Like the mystery of the star
in the center of every apple.
The apple isn’t evil. The woman
wasn’t evil, didn’t have to change,
stop hanging out with Jean and Joan. She is
all over town. This can go on.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. She co-authored The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.
by Caitlin Cowan
“Maybe distance is what I know of men.”
—Diane Seuss
Have you ever seen a zen wishing stone or whatever
sad version the West sells in the neon kitsch of its dying
shopping malls? You write in water to watch it go—
something you want to disappear (pain) or something
already gone (you). I used to cry over that video I took
one night at Beans: August in Texas and you were nothing
but sweat, three buttons undone. You traced our names
in pint-glass condensation on the table’s graffitied wood.
Each word (meditation) laments what it really wants (ruin).
S + C you swirled into the sun-bleached planks, racing the heat
that wouldn’t let our seeds blink open. The distance between
what we wanted and what we had—back then, it was unbearable.
The beer garden evaporates. Our initials in your wet cursive:
headstone after headstone while we both looked on, still breathing.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Born and raised in the Midwest, Caitlin Cowan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Anomaly, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. She’s taught writing at the University of North Texas, Texas Woman’s University, and Interlochen Center for the Arts, and serves as the Director of International Tours at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Find her at caitlincowan.com.
by Ashley Elizabeth
when teachers think field trips
to plantation and cotton field
are “great ideas” for black students,
I know their ancestors
were my ancestors’ masters
and scarred their backs heavily
were the ones ripping apart families
for profit or pleasure or both.
these teachers are also the ones that say
if we don’t learn from our history,
we are doomed to repeat it.
doomed for one community
to merely exist as footholds
because of the color of their skin again?
I want to laugh at these white women.
loudly. in their faces. and cry.
they are doing this. now.
and don’t realize it, don’t see our children
as more than poor, slang-speaking,
pant-hanging thugs.
why bring an anger they already have to a boil?
the anger is in our dna. the anger is in my blood.
we black people don’t need no reminders. never have,
all we need is conversation with our grandmothers to re-live it.
and our children don’t need to be auctioned off
even in jest, in “well-meaning” dialogue.
sell your white kids, then. we not property
nor playthings. we people.
do not forget this
in the haste to dehumanize the black body
to break black boys.
Don’t worry—our children will learn their history
of pain and adversities and truth
but not like that.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ashley Elizabeth is a writing consultant, teacher, and poet. Her works have appeared in Bonnie's Crew, yell/shout/scream, and Zoetic Press, among others. She has a chaplet, letters from an old mistress, with Damaged Goods Press. When Ashley isn't serving as assistant editor at Sundress Publications, she habitually posts on Twitter and Instagram (@ae_thepoet).
by Anna Leahy
…a sobering message for Southern California after a week of raging wildfires: this is your new normal.
CNN, December 10, 2017
The only thought, water.
Rising tides, the boats lifted. Water, water, everywhere.
The lips crack as if kissed too much, as if leaving the mouth, dry.
Heat is a game. You’re getting warmer. You’re burning up.
Weakness, in the knees, of the flesh, in the moment.
Early leafing, early blooming. How will the bees know the when of their lives?
The body reshaped too easily, the back of the hand unable to feel its form.
Loss of ice and snow, the world uncapped by thaw.
Inability to eliminate waste when there's something soluble left to give.
Swimming acidity by the tons, oceans moving toward neutral.
The heart races. The blood’s sluggish.
Wind means fire. Rain means flood. The weather becomes wild.
Loss of salt, in the wound, worth one’s. Everything depends upon the smallest pinch, a grain.
More frequent and violent extremes. Abrupt, from the Latin to break away. Or steep.
Slowing, confusion, the world spinning.
Fever, the world over. Earth in stupor.
Sleep. Or extreme dozing off, or sleep that cannot reverse itself.
___________________________________________________________________
Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter as well as the nonfiction book, Tumor. She is the co-author of Generation Space and Conversing with Cancer. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chapman University. See more at www.amleahy.com.
by Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Ghosts threading space between animals.
Imagine: shoals of fish, a pod of whales,
a swarm of bodies around glacial heights
in kaolin snow. The velocity of clear-sky
precipitation increases with the glint of
shadows. Ghosts float between silence
and static with ammonites in their hands
blessing the way fossils metamorphosize.
The interference with light, an iridescence.
Ghosts unlatch the burials inside earth as
roots rising from its craters, skyward. It
smells like monsoon. Birds gravitating
toward wave-crests, flapping their wings
in ocean-mist, a beacon of sunlight tilts
through the water. The city plunges into
its reflection, every fragment becomes a
joint rhythm from a harmonium. Ghosts
bless the spell of light. A plume of dust
gathers rain. Ghost of sublime animals
in the rain. The granularity of bones in
a body. A forest with galaxies of moss.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a recipient of The Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling (2019). A GREAT scholarship awardee, she has earned her second postgraduate degree in literature from England. Her work is forthcoming in The Normal School, Waxwing Magazine, Quiddity, The Puritan, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal, and reader for Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She is the author of Land: Bone / Ocean: Muscle (forthcoming with dancing girl press).
By Esther Sadoff
The leaves rippling
like wide-bellied sails
on a blustery shore,
the hedge thick with birds,
and the black, velvety
crickets chirping in
the cradle of the dark
tell us we are the same
age. We are burglars
arrested on the same night,
hands slipping into
a fortuitous handshake,
cars beaming past
a tumbledown shack
where a frenetic farmer
drives his tractor
upon the lip of dusk.
We are a few sparks
rubbed together in
the universe by giant
palms, poured into
the same cup of each
brief, waking moment,
falling in and out of the same
happenstance with hands
outstretched, and so vastly
outnumbered by the dead
that we might as well
celebrate it on the same day.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Esther Sadoff currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches English to gifted and talented middle school students. She has a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied literature as well as a Master of Education from The Ohio State University. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in The 2River View, The Bookends Review, and Tule Review.
by Erin Mizrahi
somebody told me
my mother tongue is ellipses
that I don’t use words for breathing
let silence into everything
I take my lover’s head in my hands
forgive me I don’t know how
not to be broken
you think I mean as a partner
and I do but I swear I mean more
I mean my dna is laced with exile
I mean my family carries a dead language
I mean conversion was inevitable
and when I tell you all this
I really mean I am a stranger
my lover takes me by the throat
grip tightening whispering gently
I love you but you’ve got to grow up
I’m in my thirties all I’ve learned is
time is a dirty word
it gets thrown at me like a warning
but the future is terrifying
and the past is embarrassing
and I think I’ll stay right here
I’ve got work to do
I’m revising a piece I wrote on shame
but I don’t know where to start
Reviewer 1
There are no theoretical coordinates and no theoretical framework to justify any of these claims
Reviewer 2
This is a really interesting paper that is beautifully written and easy to follow
What?
you say teach you something in Ladino
before you can finish I say mi das scarinyo
you hold out your hands
I pull a whole ocean through my teeth to greet you
your language is different than mine
just because our mouths can find each other
doesn't mean they understand
I am made of faultlines
of forgiveness and quiet
and silence is not easy to love
mi das scarinyo
I adore your wanting
but I know you just miss someone else
we all miss someone else
my dear have I told you
you remind me of the desert at night
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Erin Mizrahi is a poet, scholar, and educator. She received her PhD in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. She is currently an adjunct assistant professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches first-year writing. She is an Asylum Arts and Institute for Jewish Creativity Fellow. Erin is also the host of Cobra Milk, a Brooklyn-based monthly reading and music series featuring emerging and established voices.
by Carrie Chappell
& I wrap mine around hers,
Quietly, as we wait for
Spirituality’s spoon
To deliver us to candlelight
& jealousy to cork doldrum
Right in the sipper.
Our silhouettes are like two
Women fighting the same body
Or maybe like one body fighting
Two terribly angular faces.
Our legs swish under the table
& I feel like saying taffeta.
It’s then we separate,
Contemplate just how self-centered
We can get, what with good grammar
& a liberal education.
All this at sundown
Of course, in the shallows
Of the yellow kitchen,
Where my roux cackles
Louder than she can
& the burning butter
Is the smell of her hair.
So we spray the air
With our questions,
Walk the dim hall to go out to
Mock the moon.
All we feel in us is the night,
As in all we feel in us is a sea
Of terrible euphemism,
As in the water is smaller
& kept, as in they built moats
Around us. We sit there, mope,
In our whiskey-crisping critiques
& wait for the men
To turn to brooms,
The women to swoon
& whisper, & for our words
To sink in with the sureness of
How we fought for them.
Our plots twist
up our legs like
Jasmine & her fingers
Wrap around my drink
& mine around hers
So that we are now woven,
Accomplice, guilty by association.
Two women, two terribly angular faces
Now more terribly outspoken
In our silence, our hush,
Holding out our wisdom to
Wait for a real touch.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Carrie Chappell’s poetry has been published in Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Harpur Palate, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. Her book and lyric essays have appeared in Diagram, FANZINE, The Iowa Review, The Rupture, The Rumpus, Xavier Review, and Buried Letter Press. Currently, she lives in Paris, France, and serves as Poetry Editor for Sundog Lit.
by C. Kubasta
The bee box arrives, its furious Latin, or Greek: menarche & all that. But
you know what this is for, this is not for
you. Nubility comes later, maybe. You are neither predictable nor consistent
in your intervals, your duration, your pain.
Less celebrated, the hive depends
on non-fertile female worker bees. We clean & build, forage
& gather, guard. We
are often short-lived, our bodies
collect at the mouth of hives, we sacrificial females, we noble
honey-drudges. Few songs sung
for this thousand-strong caste.
For the woman who doesn’t mother, others caution: you will regret
your choice. For the woman who mothers, no one asks: do you regret
your choice? But some do – there is research on regretting motherhood,
but it is the great taboo. The ecologist said, “The ability to birth
fertilized eggs – to mate – is called a ‘privilege.’” (That’s just how
she put it.) The way we word platitudes: Children are a joy; Children
are a blessing, encode non-choice into our Cultural DNA.
Since stopping my fallopian tubes with nickel and overgrowth flesh, I’ve become
predictable & consistent in interval, duration, pain. I exceed my own estimation
of absorptive materials, the ticking of the clock. I throw clots, accumulated
endometrium. (Brood cells uncleaned). The women I know
are long past this – menopausal, or hysterectomied. The aged queens ask
why I save this equipment, this empty room, this deflated balloon.
As if it only values with use, as if it doesn’t reside inside me, isn’t me.
As if I haven’t stored things there: an armoire; two tube TV’s – their elegant curved backs, outdated, but still working; some clothes I may fit into again.
The nuptial flight marks the position of the hive, days after the Queen
emerges from her cell; other flights last only minutes, long enough
to collect what she needs of drones, before returning to keep the factory
humming. Sometimes she cannot or will not
fly; sometimes she leaves. A hive without a proper queen is doomed.
___________________________________________________________________
C. Kubasta writes poetry, fiction, & hybrid forms. Her most recent book of poetry is Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press) and the novel This Business of the Flesh (Apprentice House). Lately, she's been writing feminist horror—and is excited about her forthcoming collection of short stories Abjectification (fall 2020). Find her at www.ckubasta.com & follow her @CKubastathePoet
by Sarah Stockton
An old woman gave me a geode to cure anxiety
but no instructions on how to break it open
and let the magic bleed out.
I remember the joy I felt at first,
clenching the rough dragon’s egg
which would set me free, until I tried
to smash its secrets apart—my fingers
bled all over the dense crystal prison
concealing amethyst, dolomite, quartz.
Hacksaws, hammers were no use; my teeth
broke tasting stone then the rock lodged
in my throat after shredding my tongue
until that same old woman slapped me so hard
I began heaving up bile, blood, and great globs of anxiety—
eventually, I spit the god-damned geode out.
You’re welcome, she said.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Sarah Stockton completed her MA/Edu at San Francisco State University, freelanced as a writer/editor, trained as a spiritual director, authored two books, and taught at the University of San Francisco. Adjusting to the realities of a decades-long chronic illness, Sarah now lives with her husband in the Pacific Northwest and writes poems. Sarah's poems have appeared in Glass Poetry, The Shallow Ends, Rise Up Review and Crab Creek Review, among others. Poems forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine and Gone Lawn. www.sarahstockton.com
by Kami Westhoff
You close your mouth
to the spoon’s cool curve,
not impressed with the cubes
of summer melon. Soon, you
will refuse other favorites,
maple nut ice cream, clusters
of chocolate-bound
peanuts.
We are told it’s a blessing,
this gradual refusal of what
you love. Your face still
bursts into relief when you
see us, we are swallowed
in the split-second when
we are daughters a mother
just wants to hold. Though
the nurses won’t say it, we
know this is cruel—
this reminder of who
you once were, of what
you’ve since lost.
We want you summer
again. When we’d watch
you half the melon, scoop
the mess of seeds from its
center, carve flesh so carefully
none was lost to the rind.
We didn’t get it, but now we know
you were teaching us everything
we’d ever need to know about love.
The way it halves us. Slices us.
Carves the best of us from what
cannot be swallowed. Closes
its mouth to the rest.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kami Westhoff is the author of Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising's Dare to Be Contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. Her work has also appeared in various journals, including Meridian, Carve, Third Coast, The Pinch, West Branch, and Waxwing.
by M. Soledad Caballero
Here. Take this apple, small and sweet
like the middle of his heart when he was
born, a heart that was not certain how to
beat. Small sack of veins and rice paper-thin
skin, he looked like an old man with wide
grey eyes and wrinkled newborn bamboo
fingers. Oh, he was a sack of joy then, like
apples in the middle of a pie. Don’t get me
wrong, he is now so annoying like the wild
woodpecker that throws his head into
a tree, all day all day all day, a mad mad bird
who beats the same beat with the same
charcoal beak and what you want to say
is, ya, ya, enough hijo, no more banging.
Yes, I know this language of eye rolling.
This wish to stop the sounds from his mouth,
hold his body down, force his mind,
his thoughts, his lanky self to stop, to stop
to be still. Basta, you want to say. No mas.
I know. I have done it. I know this wish.
The wish to freeze time when he throws
his whole body into my arms, like a wilding
thing that cannot feel anger or fear, a boy
who wants to share his blood and the mess
of his mind with you so much he hurts
you in the flight between his body and yours.
He is something like lightning. Or Hermes
mid-run looking for invisible fairies just to
prove they are in the forest. Es mucho, we
say at family dinners, es mucho.
So maybe you see his flutterings, his deep
deep laugh, his body like electricity and you
think, maricón. You think the ugliness of
stale brown thoughts. Or maybe you are
in the middle of your own wilding and you
wish for love even when your body vibrates.
I do not know. No lo sé. But I know this:
my boy, this strange creature of teeth and heat,
he will outlive me. He will outlive you.
He will outlive even the sun in the sky.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________