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Welcome to our community. You are invited to our monthly poetry reading and open-mic at no charge. Become a paid subscriber, and get access to 3 workshops a month with our fun, supportive group of writers for only $8.

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Register for the December 15th Reading and Open-Mic Here.

Night Bird

by Danusha Lameris

Hear me: Sometimes thunder is just thunder.

The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall

from the trees because the days are getting shorter,

by which I mean, not the days we have left,

but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth

and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see

a therapist who mentioned that, at play,

he sunk a toy ship and tried to save the captain.

Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that.

Who can read the world? It’s paragraphs

of cloud, and alphabets of dust. Just now

a night bird outside my window made a single

plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.

Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.

Enjoy Poems from Our Previous Featured Poets Below

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Relocation, by Sherre Vernon

When I say, I am lonely here, you answer: 
You chose this when you left. 
 
When I left, I chose you, not this. 
I just didn’t know how to say it, what I needed. 

What I needed to say, I didn’t know how— 
the way blue is so difficult to translate,  

because the translations are blue, and difficult  to see. Do light and sound travel on the same wave? 

The sound of traveling is light, you see.  
You used to tell me things like this, secrets 

secreted. O the things you used to tell me, like this: skin to my skin and forgetting without forgiveness. 

Forgive me, I’ve forgotten myself in all this skin.  And when I say I am lonely here, will you answer?

Hourglass, by Susan Rich

This Could Happen 

If you kept walking, you would eventually step outside of yourself. You would leave the bones of your body, 

the bloodlines to all that you loved. 

You would be free of breasts, liberated 
from the eyes of body admirers— 

to travel this earth like a star lily or skunk flower 

with the forbearance of golden bees. 
If you kept walking out of the self 

you could begin again as seawater, as spindrift. 

Don’t worry, you’d say, 
you’re a virgin non-body, you’re a witness 

to ten thousand new worlds. 

No lungs, no heart, no breath— 
irresistible now, what might you see? 

A bird’s dying shudder or 

lovers knotted in a plotline of release? 
You’re an example now 

of nothing, a fountain of nowhere—

Enjoy Poems from Our Previous Featured Poets Below.

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The Game

I love you I say to the boy. He’s three.

I love you more, he says back. But I love you most,

I say and wonder how love became a competition.

I love you more than Halloween candy, I say.

I love you more than sky, he shouts. I love you so much

I must dance around the house all night, doing this, and I demonstrate

the move, which looks something like pitching a baseball with both hands

while shaking my ass. He looks impressed, comes back with I love you

fifty bonks on the head, and slaps the back of his own noggin again and again

to show me what this kind of love looks like. I love you the whole driveway

and parking lot. I love you every pothole in New York City. I love you

more than abcdefg. I love you more than purple, more than gold.

I love you more than cat vomit and dog poop. I love you all the dead people

in the cemetery. I love you eyeballs and bones and rotting skin, and . . . and . . .

he’s looking around wildly for the right thing to say, his eyes scanning

the floor, the ceiling, the shelves, and then… I love you so much

I hate you. We stare at each other across the kitchen.

I know what he means. I love you so much

I hate you too.

Nancy Miller Gomez, author of Inconsolable Objects, (YesYes Books)

Mockingbird

All night the mockingbird trilled in the pepper tree

outside the bedroom window, so loudly even I,

despite near-deafness and heavy sleep, could not

help listening. For hours he warbled, his song

about nothing and everything unspooling

like the river, percolating over rocks on its way

to nowhere. I’ve heard that he sings so long

and hard out of desperation, as poets do,

wanting to stun the others into silence.

Robbi Nester, author of Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag)

Also, Enjoy Poems from Our Previous Featured Poets

Jessica Purdy

Sestina in the Voice of Frances Glessner Lee

When I was a child and heard the word murder

It hit me in my center and entered my sleep.

What was this fear I’d never felt? This worry.

In my imagination, my body was carved with an adorable knife.

Each entry meant another miniature. Crime scenes in a nutshell.

Imitations of little deaths in my head.

My dollhouses made them real. To study the bludgeoned head,

the intention. My marriage had been murder

motherhood stifling, in a nutshell.

My husband could only sleep

around. When I was young and in love I said I loved knives.

Guns and their chambers made me worry.

I wasn’t prepared for worry,

but I could make a doll’s head,

a cloth curtain, miniature furniture, a protruding knife.

Was it suicide or murder?

Did it happen while the family was asleep?

Each room seen from above like the walnut shells

my mother would crack, create baby bassinets out of half a shell

with glue and old sheets torn by worried

fingers, feet. Ripped and tucked over a toy mouse asleep.

So now I make dioramas, dolls with bashed-in heads,

cigarettes that glow red, bullets lodged in ceilings. Murder

into art. Maybe the police will think of me like a knife:

cunning and sharp. I’ve always loved knives,

shield myself from those that don’t take my Nutshells

seriously. These detectives need to learn observation, and murders

need to be solved by looking. Don’t worry,

make time for the details in your pretty little head.

Did this one die in his sleep

or did his wife poison his wine and make him sleep?

Did the perpetrator knife

the girl in the chest and then head

home? Crack nuts and leave their shells

like trails of bread crumbs? Did her mother worry

she’d never grow older than sixteen, the victim of murder?

I’ve started sleeping with a knife

under the head of my bed. My obsession became the Nutshells.

Still, my ultimate worry: the precision of murder.

Kim Malinowski

Blatant Blister (from Buffy’s House of Mirrors)

I want to peel layers

of anxiety like sunburned skin.

Want to burn haunted itch.

Bring me fire.

I’ll dowse myself in kerosine.

No need for demon to teach

me bad dance moves.

My nails dig into my flesh,

no stake to save my heart.

Where do I go from here?

Prescriptions twist me into pretzel, antidote vampire bite.

I dare to grip Buffy’s flame.

Let it freeze me into solid ache.

Unresolved tension when

love

doesn’t matter and want

makes us flame.

Rita Mookerjie

Reading June 16, Workshop June 23

Common Era

In the 7th century, the astronomer Brahmagupta pauses

his sky cartography and considers some numbers. After,

he writes theories of debt, of wealth, and of something new.

He calls it zero and is the first to arrive at this idea since zero

is not often a feature of this world with its excess and bounty

and surplus. Zero was not apparent to the Greeks or the Romans

with their little nude boys, bronze bulls, and virgin brides. All

these amounts of things and time. But because of Brahmagupta,

I can imagine a system of time that starts with the year zero,

a system that isn’t punctuated with hot war or conquest, I can imagine

a way to name this planet and its people in several places, with

several beginnings, but mostly without that baby god god baby

that zealots love to misquote. Everyone knows the baby god’s

name as well as the white man they keep him inside, you know the one,

that hunky Anglo wet dream: blue eyes, bloody body, muscled and raw.

Even today, centuries later, it is still the year of their lord. They have

kept their monopoly on time and peddled that white homunculus

to every corner of the globe. Let him stand aside as I look for my

people, my ancestors, and our contributions to the world. I am no

child of Brahmagupta, but I see past painted idols and glass kings.

Joan Kwon Glass, Reading June 16

The Way We Were

That last summer, not ready to admit defeat,
we set out too often to the beach like soldiers
on a mission, trying to prove something (what?).
Your father pulled you and your brother behind him
in a little red wagon, quietly disapproving of me,
a now familiar look of discontent on his solemn face.

Afterwards, I hosed you down in the driveway,
a ritual I repeated from my own childhood.
The smell of cold water and metal remind me
of returning home, hot and tired from a day at the lake.
My father holding the garden hose to my lips,
popsicle in my hand gleaming like the purple sapphire
in a fairy tale, the sun blocking
the expressions on my parents’ faces.

On those wide open summer evenings,
you puttered around the house in pajamas,
your bony, sun-kissed shoulders not yet burdened.
Smiling and oblivious, you clutched my old copy
of “Our Town” too tightly in your dimpled hands,
pretending you could read it, writing
your name over and over on the inside cover.

One night I found you in bed, “Our Town”
tucked in next to you,  both of you covered up like dolls.
Lying side by side on your backs as though gazing at stars,
whispering into the dark: this is how we were once.

MT Vallarta, Reading July 21, Workshop July 28

Corpse flower (amorphophallus titanum): it is made of several different compounds

stinky cheese boiled

cabbage garlic

rotting fish sweaty

socks alcohol dex-

tromethorphan sodium

nitrate

If you think about death as much as I do

how long until the stench

becomes solid

I want to call your father

I am so sorry I loved [ ] I loved [ ] so much

I want to say I named you sunflower

Like him your

flesh gushes

into petals

Jen Gupta, Reading July 21

A Body That Is Shared

It is not my body, ketamine and acid infused,
mushroom bathed, dopamine depleted. I am on
the other side of the country, laying in bed while
my sister sobs into the light, watches the cacti bleed
by her car window as a man who refuses to love her
all the way drives them to a home I have never seen.

The phone chimes black and white shapes that mean
I’m okay but I am already there, each bump under
their tire vibrates through my skull. She is crying
one thousand seven hundred miles away and her tears
sweat out of my palms. After she brushes her teeth,
she blows her nose and a sneeze wakes me.

In the morning we are drained, our chests house
depleted balloons. She puts on a pair of scrubs, packs
her things and lifts a mask to her face while I raise
my computer screen. Our hands reach our coffee mugs
and her cuticles bleed, my finger wrapped
for a moment in her silver ivy ring.

Yesterday, I had a good day until she didn’t,
migraine blooming long before she called.
This never being alone is nice until it’s sad and then
it’s just sad for two. We feel like breaking a table,
like opening the earth, like chewing our own skin.

I tell her she should lay off the drugs,
that they don’t help, but I leave out the way they depress
me. It’s annoying to tell someone what to do
with their body even if it’s a body that is shared.

The moment my sister was born, my throat opened
like I finally figured out how to breathe. Today we wait
for the stomachs to settle, the invincible hum to pass.
I lay my head on a pillow and feel the curves of her lap.

Douglas Manuel, Reading August 18, Workshop August 25

ONE OF A KIND (LOVE AFFAIR), 1985
 
The crucifix in the center of her chest,
Christ in the center of her life, she liked
what that felt like, something stable
 
to hang on to, somebody who’d listen,
who wouldn’t judge. Power centered
by her heart. She leaned back into
 
the chair, let out a laugh, a laugh freer
than the mouth of the Mississippi
finding the gulf, freer than dandelion
 
seeds caught in the breeze’s breath,
freer than a whisper turning to a yell, than
hair brushed out from rollers. Putting
 
her feet up on the ottoman, she crosses
them and then herself. Rosary beads
move before her fingers do. Prayers
 
lift and flit, lift and flit, just as the smoke
will later than evening, when the music
plays drums with God’s head. 
 

Camari Carter, Reading August 18

PREGNANCY TEST

I keep it.
The positive pregnancy test.
It’s the last sign I have that confirms
I was a mother
Am a mother.

Settled like a coffin at my bedside
I can’t get rid of.

I can bottle up the blood river on the floor
Bury it in a mason jar;
It’ll grow
Green, fuzzy
I still name it,
My baby

And when the growth takes over
Becomes black
It is my child’s skin
And hope
For a heartbeat

And when baby seeps through the lid
I’ll plant it in the backyard
To grow a willow tree
Where I will sit under my baby

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