Bourgeon

The Bending

There are whales in the sky. The last of the day’s sun presses up
brilliant, flat, white bellies; the higher-ups’ downward pressure, a
strongly moral force, rounds down dark, rain-child backs. These
repel at a blurred seam.
My little ship, too dim to panic even at this certain sign that the
world is ending, skims across the chop toward home.

At the Slash

The tender intersections of all the ephemeral lines in the sky, on
the map, of the mind, release. The little crayola squares of blue and
green, playthings of latitude, longitude, colonial, indigenous, stray
off the sphere unsupervised. Human footfalls apprehended by
sensors now belong to the air; compasses searching for iron merely
tremble with haphazard joy.
Today is not yesterday. The boundaries of your nations ease into
irrelevance, as soft to us as they are to the crossings of the balsam-
scented clouds.

Supermoon
We can do it anywhere. You in?
I didn’t think so.
But look, ours is a tender, over-creeping tide searching for distant
kin, waiting for the little under-wobble that tells us that our subtle,
darkened space is full again. Penetration and surrender, let’s face
it, it’s how the world turns, whether it’s a continent or the space
between your pants pockets. Sky wasn’t made to be caged, and black
earth won’t be risen above. We are irresistible, so why fuss?
The big boss left an empty seat. Let’s us kill the cardinals, lesser
clerics of the failure of love, and find our flow. Kill the wound the
world has made of us, tiptoe to the shore, and surge.

Laura Costas is a poet, artist, and DC native. She is the author of three books, Honest Stories; Fabulae, Tales for an Age of Ambivalence; and most recently, Ariadne Awakens, Instructions for the Labyrinth.

Image: Photograph of a painting by Eldred Clark Johnson., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

ODE FOR THREE EXES

Ex-husbands, like other catastrophes, come in threes.
One dead, one fled to New York, and one out of touch.
The lost and found blues can be sung in any key.

Sometimes the one who is left is the one who leaves
first, after years holding close the same grudge.
Ex-husbands—leavers or left—come in threes.

If shoe hits glass or glass hits shoe to seal
the chuppah vows, it’s always the glass that gets crushed.
The lost and found blues can be sung. In any key,

“Erev Shel Shoshanim” will not guarantee
eternal evenings of roses and coos of doves.
Ex-husbands, like celebrity deaths, come in threes—

even marriages outside the fold. Years
later, a new wedding band, and with luck
the lost and found blues won’t be sung in my key

and no one will add to the wake of decrees,
voided ketubahs and deeds covered in dust.
The lost and found blues can be sung in a brighter key.
Ex-husbands (Count them!) come in threes.

GOOD SENSE

Like Ethiopian wolves,
I turn nocturnal with need
to translate the dark, silences
filled with loving voice mails
left by the recent dead
who promise to call me back.

Had I the good sense to pattern
my days by the chariot of the sun,
I’d write paeans at dawn, but
I prefer to make my hay by moonlight
while you sleep, sweet dreamer,
the closest I’ve come
to a sound choice in mates.

And like Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise,
sung with its one orphaned vowel,
I’m in a C-sharp minor mood tonight,
restless for barred owl shrieks
through the cracked-open window
of late fall—something to dissipate
fears that gather like flies to a wound,
not the least of which are reports
that my night owl ways
may syncopate my body’s
circadian rhythms, may even
abridge my life.

My internal clock measures two minds:
one steady as a metronome,
rocking in time to my mother’s
calibrated tones; the other
like a mare racing to the warmth
of the barn for the night
beats a path back to bed.

Nancy Naomi Carlson, winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and twice an NEA translation fellow, has published twelve titles. An Infusion of Violets (Seagull Books, 2019) was called “new & noteworthy” by The New York Times, and Piano in the Dark (Seagull Books) is forthcoming next spring. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in APR, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review, Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and Poetry, and she’s the Translations Editor at On the Seawall.

Image by Piet Mondrian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Editor’s Note: These poems appear in Breaking the Blank, available from Day Eight: https://bit.ly/3VbR9vL.

Seduction

Seduction…

Drag my finger down
their spine then
breathe them in.

The more pages the better;
read until I’m spent.

Her Breath Matters

Rainbow-swirled spheres she
sculpts with breath made of giggles;
laughter floats on wind

She and I fight…still
hugs and kisses before sleep –
a must for good dreams

She still asks me to
lay with her; breath on my neck
helps me fall asleep

BC

It costs me 10 dollars a month
to remain childless,
but recently,
I’ve been wanting to waive that fee;
even though
10 dollars is such a small
price to pay for sanity.

I become baby crazy
when I forget to take my meds –
BC without the BC
and what I sleep on becomes
more than a bed,
it becomes a vessel for wishes unspoken,
because when he gazes into my eyes,
I want him to just be able to tell.
The air is filled
with my hormones
and I’ve taken to wearing pheromones
so when he smells me
he wants to jump my bones
but won’t know why.

This is not a trap.
It’s just that lately
I’m feeling a little past my prime.
In earlier times,
a woman my age
would have had at least four kids
already,
aged two through nine.
I feel behind
and had taken to crying
in my room, door locked,
my mother thought I was dying.
Had to convince her I was fine.

Last week,
I was thrown out of CVS;
not because of a theft,
but because I had rubbed
baby lotion all over my arms
and was smelling myself.
Told the security guard I wanted
to smell fresh
and Zest
wasn’t cutting it.
I went home and downed
an entire week’s worth of
ortho-tri-cyclen
and it worked…
until I went to the park and saw little babies
tri-cyclin’
and slide climbin’.
I just wanted to take five of them
home with me
but that would be a felony.
Need to get back on the BC
before I’m in the penitentiary
serving twenty to life.

I used to think I had to be someone’s wife
before I became a mother.
I don’t feel that way anymore.
All I want to get is that teething ring.
Funny how such a small thing
can bring such happiness.
I’m anxious to be blessed
with one of my own;
until then I take another pill to the dome
and wait.

Rebecca Bishophall has featured at Spit Dat open mic, the Afrocentric Book Expo, and others, and works in member services for a non-profit organization. She graduated from Trinity University in 2006 with a major in Communications. A loving mother who enjoys rainstorms, ramen and romcoms, she can be found writing, reading fiction novels, and singing along to soft rock.

Image by Lars (Lon) Olsson – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23486409

Monk of the Written Word
For Will Mayo (1960-2022)

Will said he hated the Holy Rollers
of his small-town, backwoods youth.
After death, he wrote, many late nights,
was nothing. No heaven, no hell,
no next life, no do-over.

But he lived like a monk
in his cell, one or two rooms
narrowed by books, leaves as yellow
as October. He never left his home
to walk along the river, watch the sky.

Nowadays, to live like Han Shan,
you need a Ford Truck for the roads,
a generator, some MREs, and guns.
Will had two rooms of books and a cat.
He lived a mile from a quaint downtown,

simulacrum of his birthplace with dusty
bookstores, lunch counters, and junk stores.
It could have been the place I used to live.
It was not the place where I live now,
small city that expressways run through.

The last time that I took the bus
up to Frederick, Will gave me books.
Next time I was going to give him some,
the story of a Brit who swam in lakes and
streams, the story of William Least Heat Moon

who rode the rivers to the West Coast.
Will’s books were old science fiction – the future
we’d never see. Or they were about death,
subject of his morning and midnight meditations,
perhaps his last thought that July evening,

a cloudy day, not a hot day, not even
in that cell, with Velvet, his cat, perhaps
his last thought before whatever came next.

Rue and Rejoice

In the Lithuanian month of linden,
our July, boys and girls from Baltimore
dance in intricate patterns, switch partners, and
skip nimbly in sullen heat. You long for cool
drinks inside. These are not your people. They drove
your family from their country. I am yours here,
not theirs. No matter if my great-grandmother
knew these steps and the touch of young men lifting
her up for less than a moment. No matter
if, like these girls, she wore a crown of rue
to rejoice at the far northern sun’s return.

Marianne Szlyk lives in the DC suburbs with her husband, the wry poet and prose writer Ethan Goffman and their retired cat. Her poems have appeared in the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, the Sligo Poetry Journal, Bourgeon, Sheila-na-gig, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Mad Swirl, and Spectrum as well as a few anthologies. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and Poetry en Plein Air are available from Amazon and Bookshop.

Image: Kurt Stüber [1], CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons