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Two Poems by Susan Scheid

Gregory Luce
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Two Poems by Susan Scheid

Resilience

Even the “R” has curves
bends to the ground
rebounds
joins the others
to lead the way
on its thin legs

The Jade Belt

I feel the scales form.
First behind my ears
next along ridges of bone
between shoulder blades.

The doctors say it’s a rash.
I disagree.

I see how the scales shimmer
feel how they seek warmth.
I am transforming.

There’s a Chinese folk tale
about a greedy man who dies.
Before he returns to Earth
he’s given a choice of clothing.
He finds a glittering suit
with a belt of translucent jade.
He returns as a golden snake
striped green along it’s back.
His wishes turn sideways, like the way
he now moves.

The doctors say medicine will heal me,
make the scales disappear and soften
the leathery skin forming on my body.

I palm the pills.
Pray.
Please, I whisper, let me be
a creature that shimmers in the night.

Susan Scheid is the author of After Enchantment and her poetry has appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, Burgeon Press, About Place Journal, Truth to Power, Beltway Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, The Sligo Journal, Silver Birch Press, Tidal Basin Review, and other journals. Her work is also included in the anthologies, Poetic Art, Enchantment of the Ordinary, and Dear Vaccine. She has featured at Sunday Kind of Love, LaTiDo, Takoma Park Third Thursday, The Reach, and in venues in Ohio, Texas, and Louisiana. Susan served on the Board of Directors for Split This Rock. She lives in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Four Poems by Jean Nordhaus

Gregory Luce
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Four Poems by Jean Nordhaus

When Horowitz
for my brother

When Horowitz played Carnegie for war bonds
you were an ovum
swimming through the ovary,
a pearl among the roe.
Scraps of cloud
struck sharps and flats
in a summer sky when he played
Stars and Stripes Forever,
chords like drum-
corps marching through
small towns into ships
overseas into sky’s
oblivion.

Each note his piston
fingers pounded
cracked like gunshot,
and ailanthus
fronds in cities
trembled, cold wind
turning branches
of the oak tree red.
Bright against
gunmetal sky
the birds
flew up in scatters
and it was fall.

Then you were born
and Horowitz retired.
We wore woolen
army socks to school,
saved cans, string, boxtops,
turned out lights
and would not
be comforted forever
after, though we
scraped our plates
to the starry bottom
for the war children
hungry over there.

Intermission

Every time I offer you my hand
and give you my first
name and my last,
I become more my self

and the disappearing that happens
when there is no one
to see me or speak my name
begins to recede and fade away.

When now we return
to our seats
and the music resumes,
a larger listening

inhabits me and I live
in the vibrating space
between cadence and
interval, being and not.

A Glove

It was raining hard
when I left the house
and climbed into the cab
and raining at the airport when I
paid the driver and stepped into
the morning wet and dark and I
felt calm and capable as I wheeled
my luggage through the terminal
and realized I’d left my gloves
and hurried back and found one
in the road beside the curb but not
the other and I went back inside
and called the company for I
had plenty of time and I could
learn from this and teach myself
to remain calm and accept things
as they come and anyway
it was only a glove
(a fine leather glove
with a cashmere lining)
and it was not my hand
my living hand and not
your death or a war or the end
of the world we know
is coming and I am
here and whole and it
was only a lifeless glove lying
wet and crumpled
in the rain without its other.

Multiverse

If you’ve looked through
these journals, if
in your on-rushing life

you’ve had time to revisit
these fragments of mine
and you notice some pages

with corners turned down—
triangles like fractions
of stars—know each

marks the seed of a poem
I meant, in my on-rushing life
to come back to, one in a multi-

verse of unwritten poems
with only one life
to gather them in, only

one life among light-years
of others and You,
carry on with your own.

Jean Nordhaus’s 7 volumes of poetry include Memos from the Broken World, The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn, Innocence, and The Music of Being. She has published work in American Poetry Review, the New Republic, and Poetry, among other journals and served for 8 years as review editor of Poet Lore.

Image: JimmyGuano, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Three Poems by Lu Pieto

Gregory Luce
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Three Poems by Lu Pieto

don’t freak me out

o pitiful soul trapped in darkness
you’ve been wandering around the drugstore stoned out of your mind for 45 minutes
passing the same goo and liquor candy
picking up 3 energy drinks
to simulate algor mortis
and cool your dead body

you live your life by repeating numbers,
softly urged forward by 111 222 and so on,
which you think aid in some illumination.
riding around with an urge to destroy
just because someone with taste like yours
has taken a $2.00 lighter
and set you on fire

you’re completely annihilated
but only when you try to resist the annihilation
you pick up the last stick of gum buried at the bottom of your bag
to use it like a four leaf clover.

can you help me read this poem?

I read it for the first time
written on the back of a lighter I borrowed at a party and never gave back
while I was sitting in the kitchen at 4 am
because I couldn’t sleep
and I felt like the last man on earth

I tried to smoke a cigarette on my porch
so I could feel like I was doing something sad in a hot way
but I put it out
because I can’t smoke if I’m not drinking

I remembered a beautiful tune
a pretty one I used to pass the time with
and I was sick of the whirring of the air conditioner
against the rest of the silence of my mom’s kitchen

I put my headphones on pressed play
and shook my ass to the sound of a relationship that ended 2 years ago
that I’m still not over
and made me an even worse person than I was before

I switched to a happy-sad Whitney song
because she died for my sins
I lay on my side so my stomach settles
because these same thoughts always come back to me
and make me feel like I’m gonna retch

its times like this that make me want to become a doomsday prepper
or try my hand at televangelism
or erase any evidence that I ever lived

who cares if I run away?
the worst anyone could do is find me.

hostage

I’ll reveal myself in flesh
It’s this mystery of devotedness
That keeps me chained to my bed
Bound by burning
That’s cauterizing the wounds that have opened up
Spewing blood acid
Like a dumbass version of the xenomorph

My brain detaches from its stem
And leaves my skull
Walking a lonely mile To the foot of your bed
Where it will fall asleep
and then wake up and watch you
Until you return it to me

I see the sun
But I can’t feel it on my skin from where I’m standing
I don’t know if I want to yet, but I have time to decide
I’ll keep watching your expired shape
Which lay next to me Under this bridge
Or underpass
Or wherever we are

I keep seeing these words floating by
Just as I resist the urge to reach my hands into your intestines
Telling me that if I have loved
I don’t have to be afraid to die
But they scare the shit out of me
And I draw back from your abdomen

Lu Pieto writes poetry that you can read under a bridge or in a parking lot at 3 am.

Image: Joe Haupt from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two Poems by Aïcha Martine Thiam

Gregory Luce
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Two Poems by Aïcha Martine Thiam

hand holders

you were eating strawberries and then all i could see was your mouth: to practice the killing of a friendship is to court malice in increments. you + i a trial balloon we kept chafing with sharpish dedication,

i don’t want to argue, as we fling doors open upon harridan-level sparring;

we both, at our core, like to settle, while using adult language conveying the reverse. to hold another’s hand, is to court honesty while tempting grey areas,

you know me and my grey areas, i’m very protective about my grey areas; this time last spring you offered Eternity; now you would skin the old thing; one-dimensional in grace, i shy, as if i hadn’t asked for it.

to think of mouths is to see dripping strawberry heads and think of blood to hear offered intimacy and how quickly it could end.

cannot ask what i will not give, and i have only: a parenthesis smile (both threatening and vulnerable — and you only heed the threat);

and you, berry-stained hands i can/will not take; i’ve outgrown sticky fingers.

Barebones

sunday evening, day’s been crisp,
the heavens offer their tearful face.
rain, like a promise, hovers overhead;
the sky feels friend, feels mine again,
and Sainte-Catherine, lucent showgirl,
flutters on her vaporous stage.
on these ululating streets, i am just
another person on fire, another pair of
pulsating feet drumming Montréal’s ticklish heart.
the tip of my nose a drippy-drip faucet.
i can hide. i can’t hide. should i hide?

*

these thoughts, they make me angry;
when i get angry it’s a whisk taken
to the bowl of my head, scrambling me
all the way down my grinding teeth to my gut.
i throw my memory around like those old
sticky hand toys, watch, with cat-clock eyes,
what kind of bagatelle it drags back:
no prom. no college libertinage. so many
missing milestones, pendulating in your wake.
i wear this bulky, barbed coat fervidly, like
too many people finding God in captivity.

*

my body never tells me what she wants,
we favor different key signatures.
i walk, and she starts whirring and casting about;
i, fickle fishperson, cast about
and she starts bringing me unnamed places.
the sky feels friend, feels mine again;
while that feeling lasts i make windmills,
i make like the Montréal pigeons milling about,
knowing they’re never welcome, but still daring
— i’ve been here all along, i never left —

requiescence, creature comforts, self-delusion.

Aïcha Martine is a trilingual/multicultural writer, musician and artist, and might have been a kraken in a past life. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions and The Pushcart Prize. She’s the author of AT SEA (CLASH BOOKS), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize, and BURN THE WITCH (Finishing Line Press). Follow her work: www.amartine.com.

Image: Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two Poems by Scott Ferry

Serena Agusto-Cox
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0
Two Poems by Scott Ferry 
tonight the sun sets in its usual fashion

the spheres rotate inside themselves
and then circumnavigate bodies
in curved spacetime

my children splash diamonds
into the fire and acknowledge 
the red death

of the light as the arcs of aorta
and carotid spin erythrocytes
through their orbits

and the words which begin in
one mouth kiss another
bacterial and glittering

and the child who began as a 
cell swimming and joining 
now spins and joins

water to water blood to blood
stars scrape the inside of their
personal gravities

thermal kick and electric stance
i line up the photo so the ray
of sun splits the sound

and enters her as a lasered feather
she of almost 12 rotations 
her brother almost 4 

so many suns to open each eye
and so many deaths left 
to live through


when my knee decides to scream arthritically

i try to walk normally
force the leg to swing 
as if not through thick ink

and the pain makes the lunchtime walk
an exercise in either avoidant 
or immersive existentialism

i feel the surge ignore it
drift overhead and forget
i am a body for a few steps

it is a bit like functioning
after a death a divorce a trauma
and just moving my mouth

as if it is not disintegrated
as if my real person is not
200 feet underground 

normal choreography 
acceptable verbs for mild
soul dislocations

i have walked through the dark
the desert the light the valley
of many cuts 

under here the roots sing sweetly 
and the water gallops in the tunnels
just keep going through

i tell myself unbite my lip
relax pretend there is no pain
and hobble into each unrehearsed

room

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. He attributes his writing skill to listening to rain fall upwards from the bottom of a fictional aquarium. His most recent book, each imaginary arrow, is now available from Impspired Press. Upcoming in early 2024, his collaboration with the California poet Daniel McGinn called Fill Me With Birds will be published by Meat For Tea Press, as well as his book of prose poems Sapphires on the Graves from Glass Lyre Press. More of his work can be found at ferrypoetry.com.

Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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