They didn’t tell me where the funeral was so I know it’s everywhere,
spilling over edges with its overwhelming hunger while I brew tea
the Russian way my mother taught me because strength necessitates
dilution. There is always tea and there are always lemons; consistency
is a little gift. “Did you know gift is the German word for poison?”
speaks a voice flush with anecdotes like some bloodfed mosquito
high on insulin (or maybe nostalgia). “Beware the standing guest”
I say, or think, or whatever –– talking to yourself is a dish best served
cold, and anecdotes are a fish without a schoolmate, and I’m waiting
for my own blue lips because it’s me who was the goth all these years,
wasn’t it? Wasn’t I the one dropping the knife at the dinner table and
saying come and come and come until tears ran dirty streets through my
various eyeshadows: sad little tombstones for my superstitions, carrying
sense out to sea? Whatever. They didn’t tell me where the funeral was
so I filled a ripped bag with knives, left their sharp trail as breadcrumbs.
I’ll be waiting here for your ghost, or for a regeneration of myself
which will not recognize him.
About Sonya Vatomsky
Sonya Vatomsky is a Moscow-born, Seattle-raised ghost. They are the author of Salt is for Curing (Sator Press) & My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press) and a poetry editor at Anthropoid. Find them by saying their name five times in front of a bathroom mirror or at sonyavatomsky.tumblr.com.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2016
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
Everybody needs a beloved. Some look beyond and above. My baby died
in my arms like a Martian, his ribs imploded into the oven of his chest.
Away he went, godlovvum. That was 10,000 years ago. My baby and I posed
nude amidst primitive trees. He pecked my cheek and it caved. A feathered lizard
leapt into his arms, and it gored him. Today, I have only his latex spacesuit. Today,
I think god how I loved once his body as it materialized before me, spoke to me,
kissed me inquisitively. I loved wildly when last he was here to allow me.
After coming twice, he vanished; have you seen my ancient astronaut? He was here once;
he was the dunce in the high school play. He was always watching crotches. From space,
he could see my heartbeat through the nape of my neck, blow smooth my wavy hair.
I went back to where we met; he wasn’t there— but the pond we strolled around still lay
like a victim under the cypress, goslings dotting its all-consuming blackness like defenseless stars.
About Greg Allendorf
Greg Allendorf is originally from Cincinnati, OH. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as Smartish Pace, Subtropics, The Portland Review, Narrative Northeast, Gigantic Sequins, The Hawaii Review, and Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction. His chapbook, Fair Day in an Ancient Town, was recently selected by Kiki Petrosino for the Mineral Point Chapbook Series from Brain Mill Press. He holds graduate degrees from The University of Cincinnati and Purdue University. He currently lives in Columbia, MO, where he is a PhD candidate and Creative Writing Fellow at The University of Missouri-Columbia.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2016
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
Remain beside altarsWhere blue and greenSing arias.
In them, Night,With a thousand yellow lights,Braids its hair,
And rinses its bodyWith dark watersFrom village wells.
Abayomi Animashaun is a Nigerian émigré who came to the United States in the mid-1990s. He holds an MFA from the International Writing Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a PhD from the University of Kansas. His poems have appeared in several print and online journals, including Diode, The Cortland Review, Versedaily, African American Review, Passages North, Ruminate Magazine, and The Adirondack Review. His poems have also been included in Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems and We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa. A recipient of the Hudson Prize and a grant from the International Center for Writing and Translation, Abayo is the author of two poetry collections, Sailing for Ithaca and The Giving of Pears, and editor of two anthologies, Walking the Tightrope: Poetry and Prose by LGBTQ Writers from Africa and Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, and lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with his wife and two children.
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
My phone promises me a gas station isthe bookstore I’m looking for. Twice.I consider a metaphor about refuelingor contents under pressure over timebut it would be a stretch. Truth is, I’m lost.
Truth is there are no maps for days like this.There is no destination. That’s a liewe feed to kids that’s worse than Santa.December sunlight like skim milk,I want to walk out into that thin bath.I want to hike six miles, maybe ten. I wantto punch someone. There’s no time.And a voice in my head—not the phone—tells me no, I’ve got this, I’m already onOakdale, just count the numbers down.
The store is in a strip mall. They sellmore merchandise than books.They do sell books. Not my books,but that book by a friend of a friendof mine on moss, on types of moss.
My friend said Mosses have a special place in my heart.It hadn’t occurred to me that a heart could havea still, green, pillowed space. I want to enterthat green, miniscule world of fronds and spores,ancient and breathing. I want to grow my own.
Sarah Sadie’s chapbook, Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes, was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015, and a full-length collection, We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds, is due out from LitFest Press spring 2016. She teaches and works with poets one on one, and hosts occasional retreats for writers and other creative types.
This poem first appeared on Tupelo Press’s website during December 2015, as part of Tupelo’s 30/30 poetry marathon fundraising project.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
April you break my bones.You sucker punch me right in the side of the head.If there was a mountain in my backyard I would find you therestaring down with a twisted mouth as you hurl lightning bolts, or bouldersthat you have hoisted above your head.
Instead, on my flat green acres, you lay low,Army crawling on your belly with a knife clutched in one hand,moving through the lilies that are just starting to bloom.You curl into the dark bottom of a watering canand wait for my wrist to appear above it, or build a nestin the chicken coop and swarm my face and armswhen I swing the door.
I’ve grown to know you.Fake beauty, pretender, liar.Thief.I’ve figured you out.When you spread your armsto cast a soft light and scent the night that surrounds boysstepping towards girls in gowns and wrist corsagesyou lick your lips at the thought of twisted metal andwheels that keep spinning long after the car has stopped moving.When you roll water down the river and spark light across the backsof silver fish, when you warm the rocks for long legs to spread out on,I know that you are waiting for footholds to give wayfor ankles and limbs to get tangled in underwater vines. For us to go under.
April you crush my skull.Outside my window the sky is as blueas the eyes of my dead son.A row of blooming cherry trees line the split rail fence.Night peepers sing to me.My baby still cries for me.The sun warms my face as I walk the long yardhands folded behind me,heart folded inside me.
April you gut meyou and all your awful beauty.
Elizabeth Berry lives on a small farm in Partlow, Virginia, with her husband and teenage daughter. Preferring the company of animals to people, she spends most of her free time with her four dogs, and colony of feral cats. She also frequently sits and brushes the hair of a tamed skunk named Jon Snow. She writes poems about loss and survival, and how often the two exist as ghosts in ordinary lives.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist who holds an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Writing Fellow. Her work has appeared most recently in Best New Poets 2015;The Rumpus;Brain, Child Magazine; Gulf Coast; jubilat; The Carolina Quarterly; and FairyTale Review. In February of 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City. Her chapbook, My Seaborgium, was released by Brain Mill Press in January 2016. She teaches at Wells College.
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
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