WRITING
THERESA
look at me
stop
look at me
stop
look at me
ok come over
or i will
ok i will
i'm coming over now
oh hi
...
i just wanted to say
i just wanted
i just
it is really hard to balance things
over here
and
over there
i thought it was easier
i thought it would be easier
i thought it would get easier
when when was when
i just thought
you know
i think all the sides are just too heavy though
soooooo
i think i will chill
chill and chill and chill
like a new cycle to get trapped in
a chill little prison
it will change my shape
at least a little
and then i can try again
maybe
it is all in the details
and i don't know what the details are
yet
so pause
look at me
i am here
SARA JOY
One Kiss
collaboration, april 2020
dangle,
sway in the sideyard
here: smiles for the bored neighbor
and last week’s self
that figured life –would be some way
else by now—snap—
into sun-catching focus moment
by moment by the time
it’s over :: smoke lifting from every fire
escape in Brooklyn. warmth only builds,
rises up // shimmy down light
on a loop // the moods and movements
:: repeat ::
:recapture: recommit to step—
stop. take one, long, uninterrupted sip; break
focus. the light is, always
new and no one ever
moved quite like
this moment does
the bricks back drop
pandemic pop and pent up
patio furniture, damn.
there is so much
we’d like to touch when
summer comes, and the bulbs strobe
like you again
and again.
BETSY
DESSERT SONG
In learning to fly, you may somersault
among sorbet-tinted clouds – mint, lime,
mango, peach, grapefruit, watermelon,
blueberry, raspberry – but first, you must
master the art of flapping, which is all
in the wrist, that subtle sly arc of tendon
dipping muscle over carpals. To kiss
a sky, befriend the body. Its softenings.
Its sillinesses. How it burbles and flops
and jigs, again and again, inimitable,
uncontainable, until every cell hums
and all boundaries dissolve, until – light
as spun sugar, sweet like maraschino –
the you inside each concedes it delicious.
LIANA
Nothing, or Rebirth
by Liana DeMasi
I am writing the grocery list
Like poetry.
There is no time anymore.
I want to unzip my skin, shed, step out into the center of the room, open the windows and beg in earnest. For the sun. The stars. For anything other than copper on my tongue.
I sometimes confuse afterbirth and rebirth. But it is only the latter I am after.
I want to be touched in a way that results in crumbled paper on the floor. Indescribably, but not with a lack of trying.
Children will be forced to read history books upside down, backwards. In this, they will hope for answers.
If I become a snake to shed my skin, then perhaps I will be reborn. Yet my allegiances are not with the connotation of a snake. I do not want my character confused.
I have taken up running with the hopes that the next outdoor adventure will result in wings. But I do not want to be a bird.
The days in which I feel remarkably ordinary are of most importance. I once sat on the edge of the Grand Canyon and told the space next to me that I was insignificant. It was liberating. To be nothing.
KATIE
Look, I have an arrhythmic heart-
song and do you want to hear it or not?
Its’ melody middles somewhere between tear (verb)
and tear (noun), as in, yes, behind these mirrored
sunglasses there exists one, OK fine, now two —
and TEAR, like the t-shirt, the bramble thorns, the way
a bat can cleave the air of the nightfield. I can hear them
both down in the renovated basement, seesawing across
the thin ditch that separates the holding of oneself
from the dislocation
of one's shoulder. Like, who was I to take this blanked
page pressed from the fascia of an old birch, marr it
with a song I can barely hum along with and not expect
to be slapped? But then who was I to
be without it? The song, I mean, and the slap, the rippling
silence that followed.
SASHA
ODE TO THE GREEN LIGHT THAT COMES THROUGH MY WINDOW EVERY AFTERNOON
The green light comes through the window.
I unpeel the banana. Life is a seesaw. I want to be touched.
To be picked up and placed gently down into August.
Instead, the slow rocking of another hour.
Instead, I peel off the doll and take care of it.
Voices turning in my hands. Lean in.
Prune the greening of days accounting.
I squat to hug the potted plants.
I feel another version of myself
pushing me on this swing.
The night disappears from my palm. Lean out.
I let loneliness sit in my lap. I wake
to the tick-tocked refrain of I am here, I am here.