Tag: poems

Goddess Wept a Daydream | Lee Frankel-Goldwater

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Image: Ksenia Yakovleva

Goddess Wept a Daydream
into echoes of silence and storm

Sarah danced through green grass
across a field, a river and rocky plains
gathered water from the well-springs,
bathed in starlight infused pools

Morsels of sweet grew on reeds
and beds made from its stalks
Beside the fresh baskets…
Fire spoke with moonlight
and sleep behind her eyes

Dreams of quiet leopards in the night
Raindrops petal upon thatch-top and stone
As light painted gently upon her eyes

Fresh air and dew
pooling water in baskets
whispers of times yet passed
the catch of small fish
she washed with root
and healed with twig
in devotion to spirit
and great grass sky

holding hands with the wind

Lee Frankel-Goldwater is a teacher and a poet seeking the sage’s path. He knows it’s about the journey, and yet dreams of the destination. One of peace, one of less fear, or worry, or shame for all. He believes there’s some good in this world worth fighting for, and prays that his every deed is made into this backdrop. Lee writes at the Writer’s Block, dances at Mi Chantli, and plays around Boulder, CO. He’s always ready for a story.

Through the Looking Glass | S.N. Rodriguez

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Image: Tyler Jamieson Moulton
Through the Looking Glass

Land-starved and stubborn we pile 
windows on top of windows and climb 
so high everything looks small and distant.

Birds leap into the sky wide-eyed and unbound
and rocket themselves into cloud and blue-
stained glass stunned like butterflies 

in freefall spinning and spiraling through
the wind. I heard the thick thump against 
the double-pane and caught a mourning dove

as it fell solid as a blood-warm stone in my hands.
Its feathered imprint a chalk outline of wings
and beak left stamped against the looking glass.

Too often we see what we want to see until
it’s too late. I stick vinyl bird-shaped silhouettes 
on the reflective surface like dusted ghosts

and recite them as I rub them flat with a card
     sparrow,     dove,     cardinal,    blue jay, 
finch,     mockingbird,     grackle,     wren.

S. N. Rodriguez is a writer and photographer in Austin, Texas. She is a Writers’ League of Texas 2021 Fellow and her work has appeared in The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, Blue Mesa Review, River Teeth, and elsewhere.

My Atomic Pin-Up | Damon Hubbs

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Image: Tanya Nevidoma
My Atomic Pin-Up

Binion’s Horseshoe is a rest stop on death’s highway.
We’re in the hotel’s north-facing room
on a sofa shaped like an old-style riverboat. 
Igneous cracked succulents are pinned 
like voodoo dolls against the sky.

Miss Atomic Energy 
shakes fallout from her dress 
and it frissons like a forest of morels
on the glitter gulch carpet.
The Evening Telegraph said she radiated loveliness.

A new part of the soul wakes up
when the desert wind cries on Frenchman’s Flat. 
What does it sound like?
Like 16,800 years ago 
when Lake Bonneville

bled out into southern Idaho
leaving the salt flats 
to homegrown racers and their Gadgets

the speedway a buster-jangle
of roadsters and lakesters 
winking like Trinitite on dry white rime.

Me and my atomic pin-up
put on sunglasses and count down from ten. 
The sky, Gerboise bleue with teeth like flamethrowers; 
our old-style riverboat upshot in a knothole of sand 
and scorpion gunwale

Damon Hubbs is film & art lover / pie bird collector / author of the chapbook ‘The Day Sharks Walk on Land‘ (Alien Buddha Press). Damon’s poems have been featured in Book of Matches, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Otoliths, Datura, Roi Faineant Press, Apocalypse Confidential, Yellow Mama, Sparks of Calliope, Cajun Mutt Press, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Horror Sleaze Trash, The Beatnik Cowboy, and elsewhere. He lives in New England. @damon_hubbs

And Then, Gone | Elaina Edwards

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Image: Adrian N
And Then, Gone

When we decided to end it, I was stuck thinking of the night
---------with fried rice and blue calcite and all the orange
 light over rosé in the only restaurant open in town so late. 
-- - ------ - -  -- It is the middle of winter in Marfa, and you watch me
- - - - - - - - ---  run through downtown in the width of the blue moon
to the car so we can drive to the lookout off Highway 90
- - - ----and watch the Marfa lights flare, bounce 
and fall back down beside twitching desert grass. 
---------------- - - ------  There’s a couple next to us who has been camping out here,
---------------------------documenting this phenomenon every night for a week. 
- - - - -They tell us each light has its own behaviors, own patterns. 
---------------- They speak about aliens and energy. The army and angels. You’re not 
-----------------convinced by any of them. You whisper human possibilities
-----------------in my ear: maybe they’re cars moving on the highway 
------- over the mountain, truck lights, fast food signs…
--------I point to one yellow light pulsating so faint far 
------- out in the field, I must convince myself it even exists: 
pulsing and fading, fading, and pulsing, and then,
gone. There is a moment when all the lights go, 
--------and it is simply dark. Why do we keep watching? 
----------------  Goddammit,
--------------------------if we want to know what this is 
--------------------------why don’t we just run out and grab them?
But we don’t. 
--------------------------The lights reappear again and bounce off each other 
---------------- in silence. Melting and glowing.
---------------- We don’t want to know what they are. 
The joy is the obsession, the pondering, the pulsing. 
And the total darkness. Yes. 
---------------- It is also that.

Elaina Edwards (she/her) is a poet from the Texas Hill Country. She has her MFA from Texas State University. She is an ecofeminist poet that loves to dabble in the supernatural. When not reading or writing, she watches way too much X files with her partner, Stephen.

Ecclesiastical | Cole Henson

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Image: Adrien Stachowiak
Ecclesiastical

There is a time to think and a time to do
and a time to observe the purple-orange sun
as it introduces itself to the gold-laced clouds of morning

There is a time to lose and a time to find
and a time to sputter away like a balloon struck by a pin
returning to its first flaccid form, only now stuck in a tree

There is a time for victory and a time for forfeit
and a time to wrap yourself in gray matter
as caustic water fills the buckets yoked upon your shoulders

There is a time for peace and a time for war
and a time to set fire to the playing-card kings
who spew bile between bites of pork and cake

There is a time to sing and a time to scream
and a time to conversate in whispers with her
cars and trains crying as they labor outside your window

There is a time to keep and a time to release
and a time to meld with the river rocks
as the frigidity nibbles at your toes

There is a time for all and a time for none
and a time for every time as we waltz and collide
through our kaleidoscope universe

Cole Henson (he/him) is a poet, playwright, and humorist currently residing in Denver, Colorado. He has received numerous accolades for his work, namely from his mother, fiancée, and dog. He can be found on Instagram @cyranowhere

All I Know of Heaven | Madison Gill

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Image: Moriah Wolfe
All I Know of Heaven
 
The magnet holding our photo to the fridge lost its grip 
sometime today or yesterday or tomorrow. 

In it we are gap-toothed and barefoot, and I can see it in my face 
grinning up at you from beneath my kitchen-knifed bangs: 
 
you light the sky above my small world, you are the star
our entire family orbits – all of us reeling through black

since being sucked into the gravity of your supernova
and spat out the other side in the time it took to blink 

away the blind spot that camera flash left mirage-ing
in front of my eye. But we were those kids once – 

shoulder to shoulder, immortalized in film. 
No matter the endless space between us now. 

I have been stumbling upon breadcrumbs like these 
more and more often, keeping them in my pocket:

a Stealie sticker on the napkin dispenser at my table 
in some nowhere-town bar. The brooch I wore at your funeral 

popping off my purse strap, the rubber back rolling across the floor 
and into oblivion so now its sharp point bites my finger 

whenever I reach for my wallet. I call them signs. 
Faith, after all, is a choice when the answers to all the questions 

that matter are written in code I cannot cipher 
at least from this side of the veil. So yes, the dead 

hear our thoughts and they send us buttons and pebbles 
and spools of thread like little raven’s gifts through a hollow 

in the universe’s infinity-ringed trunk 
because that is what I choose to believe. The truth? 

When I speak your name into the ether there is no answer. 
Just a burning in my chest, which could be a symptom of smoking

since I picked it up again. Or the particles still floating around in an outline 
of you left behind in this world like a footprint in ash. 

Collecting like champagne bubbles around my heart
bobbing in Grief’s chipped crystal flute like a bruised strawberry.
 
All I know of heaven is there better be one. 
Because you have to be there. 

You have to be somewhere.

Madison Gill (she/her) is a poet from Montrose, Colorado. She received her BA in English from Colorado State University-Pueblo. She is the author of chapbook, Casualties of Honey (Middle Creek Publishing 2023), and winner of the 2021 Cantor Prize awarded by the Telluride Talking Gourds Poetry Program. Her work appears online or in print with Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Twenty Bellows, Beyond the Veil Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Sledgehammer Lit among others. Madison lives with her fiance and their cat in a tiny home in the Uncompahgre Valley of the San Juan Mountains. Find her on instagram @sweetmint_poet

Thursday // Jackson Culpepper

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Image: Jeremy Vessey

Thursday

BY JACKSON CULPEPPER


Hoarse chimes of the clock		- - Stars float in slower time
All needs of the day, immediate	--  The moon a pensive sliver
My blood is a to-do list, circling	 -- Crepuscular stir and watch
My bones a calendar, days creaking The cold is a single clear note
Paper, then screens, these walls	- - The ridge gleams amid the dark
Anxious shoulder, spine’s regret	- - Light and cold regard one another
What is time but lines and curves -  And Earth awaits her warmth
What is time but a moving whip	-   The sun breaks, a silent promise
Work, a twitch at the mouth		-- A billion tiny eyes await
Work for whom? Forever whom	- -A million tiny bodies, wrapped against cold
Where is my soul in all of this?	-- They emerge, they trod, they watch the sky
One meeting, five meetings, 		-- A dawning world of hawk and rabbit
Will there be a real meeting?		-- Deer tails wait to hie, among their quiet steps
I know the world is wrong–		-- Foxes keep silence like antique monks
Then what can I do right?		-- The creek is dauntless, indefatigable
Let me throw one starfish		-- Water cares not for freezing, for warmth nor cold
Grace of graces, let me know it	-- A day of walking, watching, eating, killing, giving
Let me live someway here		-- Always parents for their children
Where they took away the paths	-- Always under a glowing, constant sky.

Jackson Culpepper (he/they) grew up in Georgia and has since lived in Southern Appalachia, the mountain west, and the desert southwest. His debut short story collection, Songs on the Water, is forthcoming in August from Homebound Publications, where he won the Landmark Prize for fiction. He lives and teaches first-year English in the Denver area. You can find him on Instagram @JCCulpepper and online at jacksonculpepper.wordpress.com.

Ode to my one weirdly long arm hair | James Cole

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Image: Matt Artz
Ode to my one weirdly long arm hair

that I cut you with surgical scissors, the ones
                            I use to split the lidded eye	
                 that I know you
as an invisible blonde, though in my aging I grow
                            darker by in blight. 	
               becoming, in sheepish sense, 
father to a talisman, that I spoke thread and now
		             I glean this wheat
	       of me, my fields a pair of fore-veins,
fallow plough works kept clutter null in gold.
		            I would, if you were
	      still with me, give you as a gift
to some storied hero deprived of golden boon
		             who must loose his heavy
             halyard and sail to meet his imprisoned
lover in a donjon across the sea. 
		            Sooner, I could let
             you grow, and warp so long you poke 
out every needle’s eye, string them all together
                            into chimes of cuspate sheer,
	      tie hooks and pinch with leaden sinkers
to cast, and fish, and never again fear hunger. 
		            And if I did not kill you,
	       you would be with me in those hours
when loathing struts and claps its fulcrum bell
		             along my streets, the cure
	     it sells, a miracle, and I can attest:
‘it’s true,’ I tell myselves, ‘if I can grow an arm
	    hair as long as this, it’s all true!’
		          You are with me
	    even if a nub, even if your root be plucked,
or scraped in some dragging from my seat
		            to dance, even if 
	       in oil you escape, be it popped from
frying pan or pyre, be it vivacious, sebaceous, supreme.
		            You may leave,
	      but don’t ask me. You don’t need my
permission. I am not my arm. You are not a guest.

James Cole is a poet, author, filmmaker, and scientist based out of Charlottesville, VA. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Virginia. His writings have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetica Review, Artemis Journal, and Carolina Muse, among others. In 2019, he released his first collection, Crow, come home, through VerbalEyze Press. James also servse as an editor for The Rumen Literary Journal. 

She writes me recipes like love letters // Jordan Stanley

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Image: Horvath Mark

She writes me recipes like love letters

BY JORDAN STANLEY
I. 
Dress the table while I’m out 
with the cloth stitched in 
sideways sliced strawberries 
lay the sharpened swords 
whisking wands and Florida water
for the wrists 
for the three gallons of rain 
required to make one tomato as red 
and ready as this 

II. 
Mince each morsel of carrot 
into a carrier pigeon 
to the heart 
bearing blessings from 
your childhood table 
the one with the wobbly 
leg and Sunday paper stains 

III. 
Pick and sniff the peach peel 
under your fingernails 
like perfume and drain the 
French press slow 

IV. 
Notice how a split open 
blood orange looks both 
like a pair of lungs and 
a pussy and recall 
there is more than one way 
to breathe 

V. 
Look at our life according 
to jars in cabinets 
emptied and stuffed 
with hours of ourselves 
homemade hand-pickled 
in a city where you see 
the seasons change not 
so much in the trees 
as in the coconut oil 
on our shelf 

VI. 
Open your skull like a pomegranate
and rub your thumbs inside 
the ruby rind to remember 
you are not Persephone no 
you are only pleasure seeker 
with a mother 

VII. 
Stuff your sharp tongue 
down in your lip like 
dip and let loose the licker 
that thrusts hungrily into 
the night sky like honey 
so sweet we rub it on 
our tongues on 
our wounds on 
the names of our lovers 

VIII. 
Breathe and let 500 butterflies 
fall out with wet wings beating 
against your molars and let your 
belly hang out and your bowls 
overflow and whisk me away 
whatever you do 
whisk me away 
with you

Jordan Stanley (she/they) is a queer poet and content writer who loves to perform at open mics across Los Angeles where she now lives. She has pieced together her heart and found home in Boulder, CO; Brooklyn, NY; Boston, MA; Elon, NC; and Suffield, CT over the last 10 years. Follow her on Instagram @jaystanz for writing, sewing, cooking and baking enthusiasm.

to be human is not an act of desecration | Laura Leigh Cissell

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Image: Mohit Tomar 
to be human is not an act of desecration
 
to live humanly is not anathema to nature. 
I do not apologize for my humanness.

-----------------------------------------------*

I do not apologize for the flower I picked
and carried in my hand to the mountaintop.
I spoke to the flower like an old friend 
then loosed her on the wind 
watching petals and stamen soar 
across the river rich valley below.
I do not apologize for this.

-----------------------------------------------*

I do not apologize for the shade I stand in
cast by brick and mortar and bitumen.

I do not apologize for the steel faucet I turn
loosing earth-cooled water from buried pipes,

filling my mouth with metallic-tinged life
crystal and blooming, pouring down my chin, 

splashing crisp against my bare feet.
I do not apologize for this seasonal waterfall.

------------------------------------------------*

I do not apologize for trails followed through grass and wood,
for the dent in the forest floor where I sat 
and shared lunch with a kingfisher: 
----------He, a silver-green fish, snared fresh
----------I, clementine, grown far from this alpine stream.

------------------------------------------------*

To be human is not an act of desecration.

I am nature as trees
nature as salmon spawned in rivers far from the sea
nature as lichen on scree
nature as lion, as leopard 
----------as beaver, as bison 
nature as wildfire, as hurricane
as water lifted as mist, as water dropped in flakes
as daisies carpeting desert sands.

I am nature as the curious cat–
slow stalking intrigue
delight of game, of pounce
of crunch, of blood
glutted and full of mouse.

I am humanness.
I am holiness. 
I am a masterpiece.

Laura Leigh Cissell (she/they) is an autistic, queer Texan expat residing in the Colorado foothills. They are the head of data analytics for a tech startup, an MFA candidate at Regis University, a spouse, parent, and occasionally a poet. Laura’s greatest sadness is that all the sea turtles of the world will never know how much she loves them.