In the morning her long hair drapes like black tears over her shoulders, her Hispanic bones bruised with alcohol and sorrow so that when she says good morning I am separate and adrift in those empty fields where once I drove herds into the distant pastures that maimed their long necks with the wisdom of Jehovah and if I can say I’m sorry for being who I am I’d say to her how beautiful she is her body like a stalk of corn but all that can be put aside so I just say “You look nice too.”
I’ve been here for awhile, the world outside whispering into my lungs as the thorns in a garden where the roses bleed into the firmament as if what words we have to describe them turn out to be a paradox of ignorance and poems that talk about the sea.
It feels as if all my wits have been drawn out of me with its opiates and pictures of quiet places where a man can sit beside the fire and think not of himself or how he feels sorry for what he’s done but that amid the so called suffering there is in the passage where ideas travel as sirens amid the ether a thing so much like peace it need never seek either in heaven or earth the patience to explain in its dark ethos the poetry of the stars.
The beautiful woman who says hello will not say hello again, she will disappear and become the past to remain the woman who was there when I made my exodus from opiates as she is an idea to stand tall against the lotus eaters.
In this place we are all outside the common highways where men and women travel into emptiness and sing songs about America.
But that’s ok because it’s outside, like carrion, where we pick at the edges of meaningless dreams and want to meet our maker, as if it doesn’t matter what happens or how hollow the chances of paradise only that in this place if we need love that longing is the lesson where in loneliness lambs tame manned wild cats with their unflinching clemency.
So I stalk through all this, these tired riddles that give love to no one but build a tower the winds should cast aside while poets sleep and wander through their own beautiful Atlantis
Keith Aaron Munroe was born and raised in Northern Virginia. He has spent most of his life trying to be a writer. In the past he took care of horses for a living.
Image by Sharon Mollerus, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Crossword Clue, 5 Down, and a Hint: “Love” Isn’t the Answer
I said it first, Come over here, and help me out, and you laughed.
You said it in place of any other words.
To you, to love was to breathe, to dance around the kitchen in your Sunday socks slipping in and out of tile lines and realities burning eggs and licking pancake batter off the spatula before dropping it in the sink.
In place of Good morning eyelashes fluttering across my cheek and a confession
Again, again, and again without losing meaning.
To you, to love was to be, to bathe yourself in the heat that fueled your temper quilting comfort from the sinews of my muscles nesting inside my heart as a mouse in midwinter pumping my bitter blood with your saccharine promises.
In place of Good night hair falling in a pile in my lap and you laid at the base of my spine.
Until I made myself sick with your sweetness.
The way you said it, and how often, I forgot to tell you how some people build brick walls around their hearts, and I am one of them.
Well, to me, to love was 5 down and zero to go, and all I knew in your arms and breath was that I wanted to exist as you did to sing ballads from twenty-twelve instead of sitting at the table hiding in black coffee and newspaper puzzles
instead of silence brushing over your sticky syrup fingers and green-tea-honey-stained lips I wanted Good morning to be waking with you crashing to the floor together forgetting to sneak out before the sunrise glow broke watching you on pink mornings petals opening and vines climbing to entwine their limbs around the object of your affection inviting you inside my mind with a welcome mat to learn freedom, and it read, I don’t know how to love the parts of myself that are becoming you.
Down, across, and undefinable by black grids and ink.
Love was as easy as trusting, which is to say not at all—but I needed an answer, and you let me hold you until the moon until my sleep-drunk truths painted your body in bruises until I could not untangle your nerves from my own.
Whose voice spoke as the words tumbled to the page? I felt them through your limbs: I love you, I love you, I love you. You said it in place of any other words, and in return, I called you mine.
The Girl in the Striped Overalls
I heard of love like spirits, the image of a woman floating in on a bed of cloud dust and moonlight, beauty like gold in a gossamer gown, soft and safe, needless of want.
But I fell in love with the girl in the striped overalls, she stomps into my heart and climbs inside my thoughts, clumsily, heavily, hiding her gentleness from my corruption.
She is unyielding behind those loud lines of color, red and yellow, blue and the ocean with it, and in all understanding of the world, where there is sight, so is she. This, I must hide from, too.
There is no room for love or beauty in me, only the clash of my emptiness, the fog resting on my shoulders, and the cloth draped around the semblance of a lover’s form, shrouded from meaningful existence.
This darkness, against her screaming brightness, incomprehensible, in the way even her hair is pink, and now so is mine, unnatural brilliance that binds us together, and we begin to wonder, is this poison, after all? How far a leap from dye to death?
She is everywhere, she is suddenness, she is my unweaving, the shards of light that leap forth like the stardust that created the first woman, an incantation for unwelcome synesthesia, blinding, carving my eyes from their sockets.
I refuse to yield, but as she rises with daybreak, there is another tide of damp regret that pulls me back into the depths of misunderstanding, and I refuse to yearn. There is nothing to desire here, nothing to do but suffocate the flame she lights in me.
Which is corrupted, the prism or the void? If all of this is true, if we can trust that shades of light define perception, my own theory of love emerges, and it is this:
If I am the absence of color, then she is everything I stand to lose.
You Guessed Wrong
I had another dream about you last night woke up wondering where you went if your breath still fills the space between waking and sleep, in someone else’s bedroom
and I want to tell you how I am and who I’m not lay out all those things of yours that I wove into my being without confessing that I miss the moments you forgot to leave behind
neon lights and sober parties and flour on the floor the vacant familiarity of fair-weather friendships knowing without knowing knowing without ever having truly met
and it makes me think how I’ll never see you again you’re in Tempe now and studying forensics I’m on the other side of the country trying to forget we met, so when they ask me,
Have you ever been in love? I don’t have to tell them about the taste of orange juice and how I would’ve been okay if I really had been dying that night I passed out on your couch.
You’re the reason I get pancakes at the hotel breakfast buffet and always wish they were blini because if they can’t taste like my mom’s I wish they were yours
I keep steeping my tea bag too long until I choke on the bitterness, remembering you and how you looked at me like I was a stranger, but I let you braid my hair.
Lex Page (he/they) is a queer young adult writer, poet, and student at the University of Virginia pursuing a BA in English. Through poetry, he seeks to explore the messy edges of queerness, gender, and family and examine love’s meaning in all its forms. When not attempting to become a local cryptid, lex is working for LGBTQ+ advocacy groups and making questionable decisions in the kitchen.
I didn’t know which ones were nasturtiums until after the warm September afternoon I spotted their round leaves with orange and yellow flowers on the side of middle path,
Chosen by a gardener as part of a plan, I imagine, as I think of the free seeds picked up on a trip to the Lowe’s near my house on one spring day when there was plenty to forget
and I tossed those seeds into the overgrowth of my garden, thinking only of the times I had enjoyed nasturtium blossoms in fancy salads, not expecting much, busy with the end of a semester, never looking for the
other end, like on this path, always going forth and never back, never idling like summer time but looking forward to harvest or the sowing of seeds, the nurture in between consuming all the hours
of the seasons we may have noticed while not looking around to find out what comprises this incidental beauty, the space in the middle of our hurry, but when I looked up moon-shaped leaves
and the colors of nasturtium, it turned out they were part of what I already knew, the part I noticed and remembered long enough to find out more, to connect with something from other walks of life, to look up.
Dog Fountain, Mount Vernon, Ohio
A plastic orange lab shoots water out of its mouth; all the dogs do, towards a golden bone in the center of the fountain in the middle of the old downtown, a corner where for six months of the year passers-by lean into their scarves, heads down into the wind, but after the thaw water gushes, dalmatian, beagle and boxer gleam while a plastic cat positioned to watch and retired people we haven’t seen for half a year sit, blanketed in coats and sweaters, splashing sounds like company after a long winter.
Murmuration
starlings, swirling flecks of black flocking how big they sound when they settle in the tall trees behind the house; it’s like god’s own conversation, an enormous voice all around, echoing, almost as if we could make out the words if we could recognize the language
Jeanne Griggs is a reader, writer, traveler, and ailurophile. A PhD in English, she directs the writing center at Kenyon College and plays violin in the Knox County Symphony. Jeanne’s volume of poetry is entitled Postcard Poems; she reviews poetry and fiction at Necromancyneverpays.com.
Image by Leonhard Lenz, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Today everyone looks familiar under the yellow ocher, autumn light.
This woman with the child. That older man resting on a bench.
I walk, carrying a bag and purse but you aren’t here with me.
Yesterday became today as winter cooled the air for tomorrow.
She Sewed Newark, NJ, 1930 For D. M.
two raincoat sleeves or or zipper into a seam. Each section produced on a separate line.
I think of myself like that: pant legs divided from my shirt hem by the leather belt. Two connected halves.
Seated, she watched the other women over the sewing machine.
Did they also want to design patterns? Imagine drawing a skirt’s long line, standing or dancing?
Later, she worked behind a desk during the day, cared for other women’s children in the evening, and danced on Sundays in other women’s dress designs.
Portrait of fire & knife juggling tight rope walker in Mallory Square at sunset Key West, Florida
(Whistle blows.) Watch me. Come closer. Watch me. Where are you from? Watch me. I’ll climb this tight rope. Juggle fire. Juggle knives. Juggle fire and knives! Have you ever seen such a thing? Watch me. I do many tricks. I can balance the unicycle on my face. I can ride it, if you help me up. Watch me. Don’t miss my amazing tricks! Watch me. Stand closer. Watch me. The show is about to start! (Whistle blows.) Watch me. I’ll jump off the tight rope. Watch me. Will you catch me? Watch me. Who wants to help with my show? You, from the north? Watch me, please.
Chloe Yelena Miller’s poetry collection, Viable, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books (2021) and her poetry chapbook, Unrest, was published by Finishing Line Press (2013). Miller is a recipient of a 2020 and 2022 DC Arts and Humanities Fellowship (Individuals) grant. She teaches writing at American University, University of Maryland Global Campus and Politics & Prose Bookstore, as well as privately. Contact her and read some of her work at www.chloeyelenamiller.com / https://twitter.com/ChloeYMiller
Image by: Sadko CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Time ravishes the line, with glare of color You fashion a sky, scarring silence Moon hoards the light
Scars of strange Lines fashioned into a drum a sky of silence
Time beats the paper moon the sky merges the day’s hoard You fashion a paper of lines, a scrim of silence
Strange beat of days
Colors ravish the sky Daylight hoarding moons White merges into drum beats
You carve a place for yourself
Silence-ravished time, with a glare of strange Moons paper the sky a scrim of scars
Hoarding light, the line the days beating their drum All the colors merge into white
Time Portrait
Lines appearing, as on a woman’s face Yes, sorrow, but much more Need departs, the shell cracks Strange, how beauty returns, transformed
Polished, throughout In the silent space, lines pass, as in sorrow The face, years of effort Yes, need cracks
Strange, the shell departs, transformed Throughout, the face’s dimension appears Winding lines through beauty the shell showing years of effort
cracking sorrow A face shows years of need lined in beauty space, transformed
Ann Quinn’s chapbook Final Deployment was published by Finishing Line Press (2018), and her compilation of teaching ideas and resulting poems, Poetry is Life, is newly available from Yellow Arrow Publishing. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Broadkill Review and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ann holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University, is poetry editor for Yellow Arrow Journal, and lives in Catonsville, Maryland. Visit www.annquinn.net
