Lillo Way
Dark
These governments. This season. But
the light that’s blown open our living room
and stabbed even the far corner
of the shadowy dining room is the color
of morning, as straight as a hundred
ash-wood measuring sticks. Out the door,
it yellows the old moss on the brick wall
until it is new-born green, sucks last night’s rain
out of the earth and polishes our faces with it.
You and I have survived—lived above or upon—
those who died peacefully, those slain,
those who couldn’t take it anymore.
When Izak Cohen, newly in America, learned
that nineteen members of his family had died
in concentration camps, he killed himself.
Maybe not on a glorious, life-giving morning
like this one. On this day, he might lie down—
his back pressing the damp grass—
fling his arms wide, look up at the violet sky,
and shatter the sun into glittering shards
with his sobs.
Mac Chamberlain
persephone / prosperina
our language fails to hold a season’s duplicity within a word i worry what else my tongue handles inadequately how to
hold the sometimes here sometimes not i wonder if we could communicate more effectively by accepting other
iterations maybe a slash in
my name to say sometimes i am the one who squeezes your hips in my hands promising i can make us live forever
sometimes on the couch’s opposite end speaking another language just to escape how i feel confronted by your goodness in our
mother tongue
la bruja haibun
i only know what i look like in my mother’s eyes just yesterday i drank a breath of pollen
which blazed down my throat in a foreign language
that i sneezed into the backyard mother rebuked me but she cannot know the
way the world buzzed on my tongue like a compulsion i am addicted to
this opportunity saying i am a poet knowing it’s true as grass holding footprints
even though in mom’s iris i see only a trembling boy upsetting
the field he can’t know
somewhere behind him the world
curves into nothing
the poet's billow 