Category: Poetry

Annabelle Cormack

Square teeth gummed

with grey filament,

cuspid and bicuspid,

cleave open my clavicle &

peck out the heart like a wet pip

sizzling. A glut, a guttering, head

engorged and swelling like a tick. Santé.

 

It is our own fault, really.

Diligent hands decode our bodies

to a riddle of bone, leave us segmented

in painless pieces.

 

Can you stomach me

now? Stripped and stippled

with shotgun pellets, a redblack

razzle-dazzle. I once heard

the tale of a hunter crucified

on a roe stag’s antlers and now

that stag watches from the wall,

its grinning vice of empty jaws

complicit as a mother.

Entrecôte, anyone?

 

I understand now, why the pigs

came to eat their endings

from the palms of your hands,

how you made us into something

red, something to be washed

down with sauvignon.

Auberge espagnole of a rib-eyed

daughter, take what you please, don’t

be shy. The unplugged heart spits

& shivers, vomiting runnels

of white fat on the plancha.

 

They always ask for it saignant.

Dyani Sabin

On the phone, she didn’t have to call it

danger. We all know how to flirt our way out

if you have to. Watch your drink, park under a light,

walk so you can see between the cars.

 

We held hands to leave, though they hooted

at us to kiss when they saw. But how else to

hide the shaking. Bruises on her ass, her

wrists, her thighs. She called them geography.

 

Bad joke. Lessons they don’t teach in school, although

we all learned. We went to the movies. Watched a man

stalk his way past boundaries. A happy ending. Romantic

violins played. Violence behind sloppily applied foundation.

 

Driving home in the dark she told me something

I cannot tell you. Guess. But I made her pull off the

road. Fears like tears rolled down her cheeks.

There was never a way out, no map in the jockey box.

 

Just two trapped girls, seventeen at

midnight, stopped in the parking lot

of an autobody shop, jamming broken

hearts together, trying to be whole.

Julian K. Jarboe

In the grove of trees there is total darkness, shrouded

by the curvature of the hills and concealed by the community

garden, the back of the baseball dugout, the stone wall

around the stone house. Why bother parking the car

when seclusion waits right there out in the open for us?

I teach you the practice before you learn the words.

I have dirt on my knees below the skin; I have a blanket of clover

pressed into the book of my hips, splayed with spine inverted.

 

In the hazel of morning, you are the only one allowed to touch my face

and I am the only one who can ask you to open your eyes. Adjust to the dark

and see where pale light remains in halo around the crown of the branches.

I’m surprised how softly you trill in your pleasure, breath harmonious

with the breeze, the insects, the distant world, the immanent earth.

You fell from the sky and now lie grounded in bliss and emptiness

and resilience. There could never be too much of you

or too long of a pause between questions.

Robert René Galván

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys & desires.

—William Blake

 

At first, laid down on clay tablets

like the footprints of a slender bird,

then, progressed through dried skins and pulp,

burgeoning past parchment

to a flood of writs so numerous

as to be incomprehensible—

mulled by the nine

in their archaic robes,

most prefer dead stone

to a living vine.

Laurel Nakanishi

Not so long ago, my baby floated in amniotic wai.

Oceans within oceans, and beneath them—wai.

 

Kunawai spring makes a way through concrete,

beneath streets, alongside apartments, burbling wai.

 

Double the word for water in Hawaiian and the sum

means: goods, value, worth, wealth, importance—waiwai.

 

At Red Hill, the US Navy stores 200 million gallons of fuel

above the aquifer. A war machine knows no sacred wai.

 

A gasoline smell in the water. Then illness—vomiting, aches,

burning skin, diarrhea—5,000 sick from petroleum-laced wai.

 

Perched over the same aquifer, I fill my baby’s sippy cup

with questions, Is this, too, poisoned wai?

 

Divorce water from its wealth and the words are:

expendable, collateral, justifiable sacrifice of wai.

 

Are we doing any better with these wells and pipes?

Our endless appetite for lawns and showers. Municipal wai.

 

O, do not make me lie to my baby. Let what is good, be good—

this gift of water, this person you love most, wai.

Laurel Nakanishi

Oʻahu in May

the island

 

Red

 

 

 

none of it

water

Leah Bobet

the peas are in the ground and maybe it’ll work

this time. I kiss your shoulders and crack jokes,

one day on, one day off, just like our doctor said,

and when the clock reads 11:11

our fingers twine, and we hold on so tight.

 

downborder, they’re stealing bodies: put her in the dirt

and chant the words, she’ll do your furtive will. a million

Murder Legendre brides reduced to flickering black and white

haunted house inspections; a million colonial possessions.

downborder, they shackle women by the waist in case we miss the point.

 

it took us so long to be ready for this.

to feel it turn to bullets under my lips.

when i took your hand, my hand was mine.

 

it’s been a greyling spring, all rain, no relief in sight:

one day on and one day off. this year I’ll build a trellis

so the soft green leaves can climb, pea tendrils curious

as new fingers stretching wide. this year I build walls

that are secretly ladders, designed to overcome,

strategically constructed to let in the sun. to let you in,

chin high, arms wide, precaution circumspection set aside,

 

all of us waiting through the blood-daubed protest signs,

craning necks over knees to the flickering screens

waiting breath-held as the baton moves inside

to be cracked across the face with an open-handed joy.

Linda Cooper

*left eye* the moon/chewed and spit across the sky

 

*right eye* a slender girl/leaning on a lamppost/her body newly claimed

 

*neck* hands/uninvited/ !

 

*nose* seven starlings wheel across the sky/bear her weight

 

*hair* wild horses/meandering attention/the half-life of respect

 

*lips* curl of waves/a flag/or a siren

 

*ears* silence packs its bags and disappears/the time to listen

 

*chin* she is becoming a hawk/comet/wall of fire