Issue No. 11, 2017-18. Poetry
Contents:
Poems by Morgan Parker, Guest Contributor
Henry Trinder, Popular
David Brake, When the Kids Die (Editors’ Award Winner)
Marco Chan, Milk
Bailey Cohen, Ghost Story
Eva Gu, Upfire
Helena Keown, Old Friends in Fog
Popular
by Harry Trinder
In the third grade the most popular boy in school was a boy who could eat an apple, the whole apple, stems and leaves and seeds and everything, in just a few bites, and we were so impressed we’d gather around him in circles and throw apples at him and he’d eat them because it was the only thing he could do and we loved him even though we thought the seeds were poisonous and he might die at any minute but we loved him.
When the Kids Die
by David Brake
Kids started dying earlier, faster this year than the last.
They died at birth, dropping still from aching mothers.
They died from disease, painfully, slowly, often crying.
We sent kids to war.
We trained kids to kill, bought them flights to burning forests, scorched fields of poppies. Kids walked with steady feet and sang of water and girls in sundresses, but bullets came quickly.
Some wars ended, so we loaded trucks with white powder, filled bags, stuffed them in pockets of kids in baggy clothes. Kids stomped and sang. Some ran, some died from the drugs they were told to spread.
We started shooting. We gave guns to whoever asked. We sent bullets into crowds of singing kids, we drove trucks through parades, we poisoned water, we started more wars, we bombed homes and bakeries and playgrounds with kids swinging on red swings. We killed quickly and painlessly.
Most of the kids died.
But some kept singing, kept walking forward, out of the city, past clearings of flowers feeding on spilled blood. They walked with musical steps, treading softly on grass and dirt. They marveled at snakes wrapped about the trunks of trees, they danced to the sound of each other’s footsteps. They kept moving. They walked, swung from vines, floated across seas guided by shimmering fish and eels.
After years, the kids found themselves in a deserted city, the city they once left. The birds were the only remaining residents. So the kids painted old cement, cast seeds into the dust and dirt. They welcomed the birds. They carved into stone, let water trickle down into rivers for the fish. They walked softly, they sang often.
Milk
by Marco Chan
In preschool, Mrs. Giozzi thought I should be in the class for English Language Learners because I didn’t talk very often. At home, my father was putting his fist through a wall. Why don’t you try using your mouths, mom and dad? Try it in the morning to decide who’s bringing me and Ken to school. Try it in the bedroom. Maybe then I’d love you enough to ask you to get me the milk from the top shelf of the fridge so that Ken wouldn’t have to climb just to spill everything. The same way he did with his first love, at her window, with two completed notebooks. The same way it took me five years to kiss Lydia Gigante on the lips and then everywhere else. When Ken was five and I was three and the kitchen floor was a pool of white, I wanted you both to get on your hands and knees and stick out your tongues so we could be like a family of cats enjoying our milk together.
Ghost Story
by Bailey Cohen
When we first drank wine together,
we did so in the silence of each other.
In brisk winter dusk, bodiless
versions of you and I danced outside
in pools of rosewater and winter
constellation. Inside, we sat together,
refusing to let the skin over our skulls
touch. We held all of the oxygen in the
room. “I’m gonna lose it when Paul dies,”
I whispered to the blackbird sitting next to
me, trying to shake the snow from
her wings. “We are all floating,” she replied.
Upfire
by Eva Gu
Summer, and I wake thirsty.
In China the doctor runs eyes down my chapped lips and says, 孩子，你上火了,
and it’s true, I am an inside-out new fire just learning to walk,
elemental imbalance aching for revolution. From the pharmacist
my mother brings bitter medicinal tea in the shape of apology,
tells me it is time to relearn iron, and I wall in the city of my blood.
In weekly bites I feed on her palmfuls of bitter, mold my throat tubelike, and think
(in China we say 吃苦, eating bitterness, to try to describe suffering)
So this is the way we yellow girls learn to swallow pain. Can’t
(so this is the way we yellow girls taste, the world on the edges of our teeth)
see anything if we keep it inside.
(some appointments I forget the way of pinching my tongue)
This bitterness carves for me a throat-path of hard swallow.
In America a boy touches my palm without asking,
says goddamn your hands are hot and
I re-imagine my throat into loose shrubbery, think of gaping bonfires and acid holes and a sentence that goes on and on. Instead I thumb my fist,
swallow hard,
and think this you could build a country on.
Old Friends in Fog
by Helena Keown
when it rains in Boston, the streets
curl forth memory
like small deaths
conversations end in Chinatown
and air thickens with premonition
the streets drink it all
brew the smell after rain
I do not smoke
but every time we meet
I am smoking
do not misunderstand me:
loving him was furnishing an empty room
with one hundred empty glasses
but there is a code inscribed into loving
someone you cannot love, like language
embedded in the lines of palms
my tongue swells
with broken smoke signals
I probe them for purpose:
to be sad in August again, or
to have known it all along—
alternatively,
a rain-splattered day
where I say the right things,
sealed up in glass