petals and bees

for A

340,000 hours, more or less,

depending on our fear of the dark,

or the solicitation of dreams

or a swallowing up inside loss

or any bacchanal of forgetting

or trolley of thought

so they pass on,

each day, 28,000 give or take, divided by the blues makes our joys dense,

we will hang on for dear life to our 948 months, threaded by

our own undone body and the balmy, candied being of our other

wading together into gaudy

polychromatic dawns

or into lustrous sleeplessness

by way of weakness this is

how we remember the months that render into mere nickels and dimes, 79, maybe

more, tragically fewer, years of our

approximate life so I watch

your lips revise themselves by the millisecond

it’s how I tick off the moments.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (from 8 Odi di Orazio), 1968

I need to pass through another world to find you.

A refrain of panpipes somewhere in the non-logical distance I’m roaming

towards (don’t take that word literally).

What’s left to crucify in a cul-de-sac of tract-housing?

My neighborhood of injuries, both rendered and grieved,

each a spitting-image of the other, one to my right

one to my left – this is some kind of world I need to pierce –

how is it I can’t ache for you any easier?

The horizon is loess at the sandy scab of ocean,

(horizon is a close relative of tomorrow)

let the ground breathe beneath me.

Let time feel as a

dock weaves, on a lake, under wind, for one hot wet dizzy second.

I’ll play panpsychist for a stretch only to sell off my fortunes for you –

It’s all alive wherever you are

that’ll make millions.

I meant to say I’ll play panpipes for a stretch.

Sorry, this isn’t a world

where language cooperates. All the same,

music animates everything, in an Aeolian way.

Can you hear me?

And not my voice per-se but the pulse of footsteps at the edge of you

I have all over me whatever it is that’s just beyond the stars,

you can call it what you want,

let me in

.

Star Field in Black and White, BBC 2014, by Chema

I tell her I have never been lower more needy never less homesick or farther south of my own hemisphere she put me on my back that quick vapor of dairy farms at my lips I breathe in like the student of the universe I am becoming / I start to go under / it is pure voodoo / I see her philtrum groove and a violet Pomo shell around her neck I say turn on some music she says shh there’s something wet she says never mind that / feed pastures swathing vineyards and dull dry hills of my childhood reorganize themselves around me at first all I can hear are machines as rhythmic as a weed whacker and in conformity with a leaf blower like a viola and violin I thought / I think I started to say that out loud she said shut up and waved more cow cud in my face I go down deeper trusting the low brassy pastoral moan like a totem guide / click beetle and mole cricket are in agreement with each other it makes a kind of percussion that compliments the adagio of crow and swallow I am mostly blind and dumb by now but I can run my hands over the hemispherical arch of childhood far below and the woodwind sonata of grosbeak and chickadee above with other fast moving / winged / unpronounceable alphabets I think she sits far inside me at this point with her abracadabra devilry I don’t even bother asking where I am it is a brand new sky and white grass lay flat in memory of deer / all four movements descend and only katydids remain those final vocalists in green aventurescence / chaparral broom on a breeze / a triumphant shh / oh home you’re a woman you’re inside now

St. Martin Landscape, Ellsworth Kelley 1979

Tire tread clutching asphalt, no, I see the asphalt exhale after a rain bath; no, I see someone driven by the bottle behind a wheel, blue the wet of monsoon. I see a mind revolving around gasoline on rain, served neat, no, I see someone who’s daddy had him drinking at age nine, yeah, I see you’re dressed to the nines in that fine, cut-to-fit straightjacket.

I see a guitar pinch-hitting for feelings. I see the curved rim of your baseball hat, how it obscures two unleaded eyes wherein I see forty-one years of trial and error. I see the tires bald from miles on a dragged out, migrant road, punctuated only by clock-work visits to the fuel pump. I see you still craving. I see your knees still knocking at the thought of wet glass and whatever will go down smooth.

I can see the glossy road in your eyes. I see the tree you’re holding onto for dear life. I see it by looking at you, looking at her.  Eleven years of vertical growth, an abundant need for sunshine, rinsed in every enchanted shade of gold and honey, miles of roots clutching far and wide into your life, yes, I see the quietest, paper-thin tremor, each eye vying for more remembrance than the other as leaf after leaf drops away.

for M

for G

I thought you might,

you know,

just once –

after four years

of tragic stop-go

traffic, of four tortured

left feet free-spinning into

chaos, so

I’m trading you in

for snow peaks and fat,

middle America sky. The fact is –

I’ve finally unraveled at the feet of desire,

filleted by a godforsaken prism

of low light and homespun,

two-timing triangulation.

Dear imprisoned wavelength,

I got out, you stayed.

I’m not sorry.

Yours truly,

Grief, pro forma.

I’ll plant the sad side of my joy

in silky corn acreage of heartland

where the mountains can spoil it

with their palatial shadows –

I’ll think, damn how the years fly by –

married to such a loyal breeze.

I really thought you might,

you know,

just once –

let the chaos catch fire.

montana from the road, Susan Bell

How can I be a feminist?

yet take you –

(women hold up half the sky)

with my free hand, choke you till the words

my wife –

(pussy power)

and reject motherhood, how can I

hate my own body and be –

(well behaved women seldom make

a feminist)

hanging with the guys, a feminist

who never was once raped –

(her)story

who needs a stage of sunlight and shadow

over a baby

(I am strong I am beautiful I

let my ass bounce for you)

what kind of feminist?

(our minds our bodies our power)

(doesn’t crusade)

who sees –

(still gets told to marry rich)

who loves –

(and sometimes wants to)

who works –

(but won’t)

who sleeps –

as if that’s all some kind of revolution.

I get on top

you look at me.

I take in the implacable force –

all my bare skin a low pink,

steak, rare, resting.

Me, looked at, by you.

Here, spots, there, hairs

our dirty clothes

everywhere

the curtain pregnant

with wind

my peach face

shaking

your hermetic mouth

a jar

curtain

postpartum.

Nobody smells the socks.

Nothing shifts but

all things.

blowing in the AC by jim moore

Write a poem that includes these words: bamboozled, bloodlust, bibliography. Have the title include one of these words: contradiction, constellation, cranberry.

I’ll have it with coffee the morning

after we wet the sheets together, let’s unremember

the pool of booze we swam in, how we were bamboozled

by low visibility, some surreptitious starlight or

the way I approached the moon in a pair of heels

legs so long you could never look away, rather

you start to climb, fee-fi-fo-fum

mouth glittering with myth

all gimmicks of self but your body

left behind in the

alluvial charisma below –

hunger, lasciviousness, bloodlust, desire, a

night like this conjures a hundred appellations

my head in the Pleiades, I simply pluck you a star

and pass it down as please me and pleading:

an amended constellation, made in cranberry nail polish

and sloppy cursive, your lost name as its bibliography

with all the rest who tumbled out of the sky,

halfway to the moon, like you.

Just leave the juice by the bed and

no footnote on goodbye.

in a best western off the freeway

we left the polyester curtain bedspread,

like philistines; my little “red” emoji heart

ajar

five letters down, not the color

of my mahogany bodycon but brighter and

mostly all over the towels, some on your fingers:

like lipstick,

but animal.

We painted room 249 with

an alloy tang, your hand at my throat

your hand restraining mine

I became a salmon

took the bait,

a trick of “red” five letters down

the sheet, oh after oh, some stain

for the maids to recognize

some unanswered emoji kiss

tomorrow and the next tomorrow.

photography by mona kuhn