Forty-One
~ Cassandra Warren

You disappoint him. He says
this isn’t true but you know him now.
You finally sleep well next to his shape
and he often wanders into your day
and night dreams. He isn’t demanding
and you are always sorry.
Sorry that you can barely read in front of him,
sing in front of him, play your guitar
as clearly as you do when you’re alone.
In some ways, these are metaphors.
In some ways, these are not.
Maybe the perception is wrong.

You’ve been writing for a long time.
You break your lines better,
say things without saying them,
but it gets jumbled up
before it reaches the receiving point.
Sometimes in your head it gets so loud
that you have to turn off
all the lights. When his hand
slides across your stomach, when he kisses
your forehead, or touches you in public.
Never when it’s lips on your neck
or fingers lingering on the inside
of your thigh. That is different.
Something more animal.

–

A weekend away is not enough.
You call your life “mediocre” and state
that you are “wasting approximately fifty percent,”
although the actual number would probably be quite higher
if calculated correctly.

Make a list of cities again.
Pittsburgh
Portland
Providence
Philadelphia
Boston.
Add Seattle and New York for the unrealistic hell
of it. Keep a suitcase packed
under your bed at all times.
Don’t own any pets, keep any men
or buy any expensive furniture,
for these things are hard to leave behind.

–

You used to write about more interesting things.
Mostly larger messes, ones that weren’t
about you exactly, but someone
poured them over you anyway.
Headlights in trees, lakes without bottoms,
the body your mother found
in the backyard, and then
the one they never let you see.
These are better stories.
Less selfish, in a way.

Anyway, the point is, somewhere
along the way you stopped believing
that you deserved anything.
There is little left
to elaborate on.

Wisps of October
~ Elizabeth Alford

The night we made s’mores
at the dining room table—
toasting marshmallows
on the ends of pretzel sticks
over unscented tea candles,
watching bubbling balls of fire
gradually transform into
charred, crispy, gooey
ghosts of their former selves
which we ate smooshed between
graham crackers and half each
of a Hershey’s chocolate bar—
was the last night I thought
with absolute certainty
that our love
would never melt down,
reach the end of its wick,
and burn out completely.

I posted this on Patreon earlier, and realize I hadn’t managed to post it here!

Community Altar Sept 2017

This month’s community altar focuses on the idea of harvest, being September and all.
The centerpiece is a line art drawing of a sheaf of wheat, on which I wrote my wishes for us all to harvest this year: peace, abundance, health, love, kindness, joy, and equality. As I colored the art (with my trusty Stabilo pencils), I meditated on these manifesting for us all.

I had hoped to decorate the altar with my personal harvest from my yard, but the heat wave over Labor Day weekend destroyed most of my plants. (The weeds are fine, thank you.) I did manage to salvage a bit of the Spanish lavender, which you can see more clearly in this photo:

Community Altar Sept 2017 Close Up

I’ve also uploaded the line art file, if you are so inclined to do something similar for your personal altar.

Wishing you all a joyful harvest of that which feeds your soul!

Madrid
~ Pai Wei
Translated from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth and Chung Ling

From “The Penguin Book of Women Poets”: Pai Wei, ‘white fern’, is the pseudonym of Huang Su-ju, who was born in Hunan and as a young girl ran away to avoid an arranged marriage. In the twenties she went to Japan to study and took the poet Yang Sao as her lover. She became a Communist and now lives in the People’s Republic.

She wrote this poem during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Given the current situation with Catalonia, I worry that this poem may become relevant again. I hope with all my being that it does not.

Madrid—
Blood drops, drip, drop, from the child in your arms.
And Spain is kept awake all night
By this novel apparition
That frightens the old-time militants.
You are the splendid future,
The ruthless clean sweep,
That pulls the puppet,
Dragging his black shadow,
Marching towards you from Morocco.

You are a woman in childbirth,
Threatened with puerperal disasters,
Who struggles to protect your newborn baby.
I am afraid that your labor
Will have bled you past saving—
Your labour which has exceeded that of St Mary.

Lines for a Hard Time
~ Gena Ford
There is no website or even a Wikipedia entry for Ms. Ford. If you are aware of one, please let me know.

First published in May 1967, this poem is, sadly, still relevant.

Evil does not go always
by dark ways. On any hot
summer day, cleanshaven
it may stride across
a public place and head
purposefully for high
vantagepoints.
What whisper
hisses in the inner ear

take cover? Ah, and then
the boy is dead, others dead
or dying, and the evil
laps out in bits of hot
lead across the nervepools
of the nation.

We are sick
in our littered streets
and high places. Worms twist
in our labyrinthine skulls.
We are frightened by bland
facades.
The losses are always
personal. A phone, rings;
a father becomes less than
the sum of his grief. Could we
say better than his own words,
And we will die as well . . .
Spiral upward into All Love?
Good man, good grieving man,
all men have lived in evil
times, though few have known it
absolutely. We persist.
We love ourselves as often
as we can. And send our sons
to walk out in open day.