Bourgeon

When We Were Young

Each moment was thick,
pearled into droplets,

not yet thinned.
The clink of dishes. The rustle

of hymnal pages turning. Dust motes
hovering in a sunbeam. The back door opening

and opening. A shower of crabapple petals
falling. The first time I shaved my legs

and pressed a Lego to my skin.
A clutch of girls at the mall.

The scent of cinnamon buns
and perfume. We no longer remember

their maiden names. Now,
there is bric-a-brac, wainscoting,

soffits and baseboards, granite
countertops, vinyl siding.

Now, there’s an ice shelf over the eves,
A sluice of snowmelt rushing above us. I cradle

my newest child,
still in shock at her lightness

The Things We Have Survived

My love, in all our years together
how many times did the world end?
We measured the years in popes,
presidents, every apocalypse,
every unveiling, the authorities trembling,
high water, hell, all the impossible things.
We woke up in the future
And the world is stranger now,
every line defined,
the leaves rimmed with sunlight.
Today I learned “apocalypse” means “unveiling.”
Today I learned the end is not the end

Today I pulled the curtains back
and let the light in.

Grown
That last night, as you lay in bed,
re-learning every corner of your childhood
bedroom, the old dolls bent and silent,

the ceiling cracks etched like a map,
headlights flashed past your window
and a rectangle of light
skimmed your wall one last time.
The packed boxes cast looming shadows
on the blue cornflower wallpaper

as the light anointed them
like the hand of a priest
baptizing a child, or blessing soldiers
before battle. In the morning
you left home, and were born again
into real life, the throng of the city,
the crush of the highway,
The authorities scheming in the citadel,
the preachers thundering,
your newborn’s first piercing cry,
your wan reflection in the polished surface
of the boardroom conference table.

Sarah DeCorla-Souza’s poetry has appeared in Pensive, Innisfree, JMWW, Conte, and other journals. She lives in Alexandria, VA with her husband and four children, where she works as a graphic designer. She is also an Associate Editor for the literary magazine Dappled Things.

By Phil Nash from Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 & GFDLViews, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

I Saw You

Nothing burns alone.

Let each face be a flame of itself.
Let skin to be amber and silk.

Let a bridge join the air from you
to me like breath’s return. I’ll wait
for you—for the arch of your foot,

the way your lips are dark honey
that burns the throat,—I saw you—a red
jacket, or leaving. When I glance up

the exact color of your eyes is indelible
but impossible to say. Only once have I
come close, under a sky swept completely

clean: looking up I saw not blue but
shadows of swallows careening into the night.

The Purple Dusk of Twilight Time

Humid night I peer out my black window.
My dead parents waltz the lawn as stardust.

Their song is a music of carbon and water,
of fog rolling in, crushing little bites
out of everything, the moon.

When a wave recedes from a beach,
the sand flashes like a sheet of diamond.
It’s bright, but my father was that once,
now dark in the poverty of the earth.

The wind is a ballroom for my curtains.
My mother danced like that, until the sand
gave way beneath her, and the water came in.

The trees are ripe—they lift and drop along
the carrying of wind. They are not mine,
the sounds they make are hard upon me.

Night smears its graphite across my lips,
my tongue, and the stars like drills pierce

eyes before the rug is yanked.
What is it that the Grand Canal tells him?
What we’re made of—charcoal. And clouds.

Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual. His books are Pachinko Mouth (Plan B Press), Conrad (Silver Spoon Press), Gathering Down Women (Pudding House Press), and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey (Pretzelcoatl Press). He lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Image by Zeynel Cebeci, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Eyelashes

My daughter asks where the eyelash
she’s wishing on came from, how do
they grow? I tell her that it’s a kind
of death, which is a good thing. Something
you don’t need anymore blessed into space.
This is part of my plan to teach her
the value of cleanliness, which could only
be compared to godliness if you’d never
met god—really, what could be messier
than life? Still, it’s better than nodding
off in church. She says that she wants more
than anything to tell me her wish, she’s
practically vibrating, but she fears that,
if she does, it won’t come true. Maybe
I can help it come true, I say. This is part
of my plan to figure out what to get her
for Christmas. She’s not the kind of kid
who wants things. I fear she won’t
fit in with the Capitalists, which would
be fine if there were anywhere to go to
escape them. The wishing wasn’t my idea.
Her mother, who can’t keep to a schedule
without a call to remind her, thinks wishes
bring magic into the world. I take my
daughter outside and collect leaves. Most
of these trees came from different places,
but they’ve learned how to live together.
We look them up online, and I tell stories
about my friend, growing up, who was
a boy scout. I tell her about how the trees
help each other in droughts or warn each
other of predators. She waves to our neighbor
on the way inside. My plan. When her mom
doesn’t answer the phone, I ask what her
wish was. She says she can’t remember.

Ava Or Noah

We named you like we named the pets—
a transitory word that never stuck, so
if someone asked this one’s name, we’d
say the nickname, the abbreviation,
and then the formal, tracing our relationship
from idea to surprise to loving. You

skipped from idea to grief. A Rorschach
of metaphors—miscarriage as marriage,
miscarriage as plans, miscarriage as hope.
It’s a little thing, loss. A shining star
that draws the eyes into the darkness.

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than twenty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, Trashcans in Love, Grief Bacon, and his newest, Driving Around, Looking in Other People’s Windows, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and the forthcoming The Saviors. Bledsoe co-writes the humor blog How to Even, with Michael Gushue located here: https://medium.com/@howtoeven His own blog, Not Another TV Dad, is located here: https://medium.com/@clbledsoe He’s been published in hundreds of journals, newspapers, and websites that you’ve probably never heard of. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.

Image: Dominicus Johannes Bergsma, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons