Tag: January

Two Poems by Marlena Brown

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Babies
for Lori

It was a year of great change.
My nervous system exploded.
Fluids got inserted.
I got an iconic French bob
and my life was saved
by a woman named Kimberly.

When I entered the salon
Lori saw my will.
She had known
the kingdom of my childhood.
I sat still while she cleared away
the late-blooming sun
colored mantle.

Meanwhile snow made holes
in the “New You Salon.”
Through them was the other
white ceiling. The strip mall clinic
with the diagram
of my supposed body. When I laid down
Kimberly said, This is easier
because you’re so thin.

Then she drew the curtain
between my mother and me.

Or sometimes I went to Karen’s office,
which was dim and I wasn’t
getting much sleep, so while
hickies appeared along my spine
I became very still,
a dog under a blanket.
She constantly asked what I wanted,

unlike Lori who wouldn’t listen
and each month raised the hem
off an inch of my lower forehead.
All year we fought
over my lower forehead.
She said I had what was called
baby bangs.

One night I stood outside the strip mall
and prayed.
My mood ring said ‘sensual’
but I swear I wasn’t.
Only the cool hand of night
against my embarrassment.
The things I could no longer
refuse to allow.
Today I wore the babies

down my street. Under them
I was as beautiful as she believed.

*

Winter Sun

January 27. Three men love me this week. None of them
are the man I love. He and I loved summer but we were born into nights
like a closed mouth. When I got laid down by stomach pains I thought,

Maybe I’m gathering strength for my birthday. But the blood
was only going. Room for new blood? Three women want me
to throw them around but all I want is to be held down

and done-to, like compression therapy, or when I got a fever
and was defeated by the thought that my life is soft,
and will remain soft forever. I want to make decisions,

take my neighbors, when those fire alarms kept going
they simply moved next door. Maybe my life isn’t soft it’s a series of walks
to other people’s rooms. Each time we broke up, for example, I had a fit

when I looked around the room I would never again enter. Bevel
of his back muscle, chiming of her wall. In place of those omens, I repeat
Something big is going to happen. But when the moment comes,

I say nothing. Still my decision looks good on me,
hangs well like heavy jeans. All I want is to get looked at
or else to be two eyes floating in a room.

If I was, could I still say something? My mother says
when I was born the flakes came down in shiny white tufts,
and the sun was white, the snow emitting that blinding white brightness
that renders you speechless and leaves your heart clean.

*

Marlena Brown is a poet from Michigan. Her work has appeared in HIKA and SWAMP and won the Brown University Rose Low Rome Prize for Poetry. She previously served as managing editor at The Round out of Providence, Rhode Island. She writes about lamps and dogs.

TO A LONG-STEMMED ROSE LYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET THE DAY AFTER A JANUARY SNOWSTORM by Wendy Drexler

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TO A LONG-STEMMED ROSE LYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET
THE DAY AFTER A JANUARY SNOWSTORM
Your unmistakable brightness from ten feet away
sizzled from the grey of the pavement,
the white-fretted hedges,
and drawing closer, I marveled
at your uncrushed blush
somewhere between maroon and madder.
Most likely you’d fallen from a truck or bouquet
but I’m going to say you’re an offering— no,
more than that, an exhortation to be
as courageous as seventeen-year-old Jan Kasmir,
whose middle name is Rose, who, protesting
the Vietnam War, faced a bayonet-cocked row
of National Guard soldiers, clasping a single flower.
I picked you up—was it to rescue you from
the onrush of tires, or—the year barely opened
and already strained with threat and spent
with fire—because I need your courage.
I stand with you in the middle of the road
looking at your fiery whorls,
your tightly held petals
that have no choice but to unfurl.
*
Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018-2023 and served as programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club from 2016–2024.

January Detour by Sofia Bagdade

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January Detour

I am up to my kneecaps
in burrs. You peel chestnuts
whole over an open
bin—one peel in
with the silver flint
to your palm, and
the fear slinks. What
are you remembering?
Your mother takes over
the quiet labor, your
father in the kitchen
with a metallic voice.
The tinny drawl
carries up the splinter
banister, the light
bleeds from the basement
to the floorboards. We
walk to the cemetery
at the top of the property—
an English garden overgrown
with pale ox tail reeds. We
talk of bringing colored pencil
and sheer paper to the tombstones.
We will honor 1830 and lives lost
to the Hudson Valley like we will
turn to each other in the careful
sun as the train screams by.
I trust this moment,
picking burrs off my wool,
the quiet acquiescence of your
back to the brick, a red birth
relenting to the strict stream
of silence

*

Sofia Bagdade is a poet from New York City. Her work appears in The Shore, Red Weather, and The Basilisk Tree. She finds joy in smooth ink, orange light, and French Bulldogs.

Two Poems by Natalie Homer

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Protest in a Small Town

Trucks trailing flags belch by,
stuttering their war cries,
their reds and blues, stars and bars.

When we chant Say her name
those on the other side of the street
drown our voices

and they make sure we can see
their guns, their sources of power,
because they’re afraid

our handmade signs, our impotent
shouts for justice will somehow
destroy our sad little town.

As they cross the street,
and the police let them,
I try not to think

of how easily any one of us
could not make it home.
But who are we to complain?

they ask, and maybe they’re right.
I have no answer, so I look instead
at the planters of bubblegum petunias

that the city maintains each summer,
with such care, the watering trucks
making stops in the cool of the morning

to keep the fragile flowers alive,
even though it’s just for a season.
When our permit expires, and we leave,

the others stay behind, chatting with police,
passing water cups, and congratulating
themselves on keeping the town safe.

In church the next day, I’ll watch
as one of them makes his way to the altar
and kneels on the green carpet,

praying, I’m sure, for this nation he loves
more than anything
to be delivered                to be saved.

*

January
or After Insurrection

Again, men get what they want with little fuss.
Write that fifty times in your best cursive.

Pretty snow gives way to ice,
lights go back into their boxes,
and wilted Poinsettia is thrown away.

Under the giant firs,
Blue Jays sprinkle the sidewalk
with peanut shells.

Most days I drive past one Fuck Biden banner,
a homemade sign that says Build the Wall,
and three thin blue line flags, defiant,

black and blue like a bruise or a body.
I take up a collection for reason’s sake.
The plate comes back nearly empty.

Thousands of miles away, at Big Springs
the rainbow trout beneath the bridge
stay put for good reason

and I wonder how they are doing,
if they are being fed, if steam is lifting
off the river between its powdered banks.

I’m sorry you’ve heard that, someone tells me.
For consolation, I crinkle the library book’s loose laminate
like I did as a child, inhale its slight sour stink.

*
Natalie Homer’s recent poetry has been published in Puerto del Sol, American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Ruminate, Sou’wester, and others. She received an MFA from West Virginia University and lives in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first collection, Under the Broom Tree, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press.