Tag: October

In October, You Leave Rehab Before the Miracle Happens by Jane Ann Fuller

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In October, You Leave Rehab Before the Miracle Happens

Say the leaves surrender
and it’s beautiful.

Say the yard is strewn
with the brilliance of the defeated

their brittle bodies scratching their music
on your front lawn.

This time, maybe
you got what you need

like this dervish of leaves,
their wildness freed.

If I pay attention
even I can find the sacred

playing footsie on the grass
as the wind picks up

the dead and lays them
at my feet while I wait

on the front porch
for your arrival.

*

Jane Ann Fuller is a poet from south eastern Ohio whose book Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions) was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. A Best of the Net nominee, Fuller is a recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize. You can find her poems in Anacapa Review, Bear Review, BODY, Calyx, Ekphrastic Review, Hunger Mountain, Main Street Rag, Shenandoah, ONE ART, and many other literary journals. Her new manuscript Darkened Window was a semi-finalist for the Washington Prize and is still looking for a home.

Two Poems by Jesse Breite

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After the Tulip Sale at the North Carolina Arboretum

Soon they’ll be undressed,
petal-shriveled, disappearing—
as light or smoke, shaped
and potted as they were
to dollar decimals, sold.
We’ll forget how—flashing
pictures—we tried to join them
as if we were the same—
our bulbed heads rising
like snakes from a slumber,
how we too were top-heavy,
falling apart, as laughter
dangled out our throats,
how we sent them to our
mothers, fathers as gestures
of devotion—we yearned
to give back our origins
to our origins with this flung
constellation of fluorescence,
how we never knew if
such spectacular whispers
would come back.

*

Arabesque Orb Weaver

October comes like a call to arms.
And they crawl out of the woods—
what you most wanted to forget.
They lace a lucent architecture
on every right angle available,
and their dreamcatchers wake
in windows. Invisible parachutes
arrive at dawn around the knot,
ornamental and fine-furred, endless
weaver and spool of silver thread.

Suddenly, I’ve walked through
the strung fabric—tangled up
in the elastic and winding rope.
I brush it off, but it’s never gone.
Memory’s like that—you can be
rapt in its quivering strands—
what you tried to erase then escape.
And this webbed edifice has you,
dazzles you, envelops every move,
spins your limbs with light, reminds
again—how fugitive is human skin.

*

Jesse Breite’s recent poetry has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, River Heron Review, Tar River Poetry, and Rhino. His first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Jesse teaches high school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two kids. More at jessebreite.com.

Three Poems by Michelle Hendrixson-Miller

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As If I Could Warn You, As If It Would Change Things

After 50, like before, you worry
about your body, but more

about its disappearance. You swear,
at some point, you hear

the vibration of the male gaze choke
and shut off like a fan in the night.

You think I’ll get used to that. Besides
every negative mammogram feels

like a winning ticket. A near-miss
you commemorate with sex.

Sex won’t feel the same, but you
suck it up. Every pressure, pull, slip, release

might be the last. Up late,
in the mirror, in moonlight,

you’ll catch your mother’s face.
Remember, you thought her silly.

In her hospital bed, barely able to sip water,
how she gestured and whispered,

insistent that you
draw her eyebrows, find her lipstick.

*

What I Understood About Being a Milk-Carton Kid, Before there were Milk-Carton Kids

I slept in a pink bedroom
in a princess bed,
with my cousin Juanita I’d only just met.

An older girl. Her body a mountain range
with the setting sun
of the nightlight behind it.

I thought living in the south meant
learning to be okay
with cockroaches — everywhere.

Medjool dates with legs.
I’d watch some, the size of beads
make a serrated line up the wall beside the toilet.

Dad said it was child-napping, not kidnapping
because he was our father, and we went willingly.

My brother left me alone. Our other cousin,
a blond boy his age became his friend.

I owned two pairs of jeans. I liked
the way my butt looked in my Mavericks—
M’s stitched on the back pockets like my name.

There were plenty of books to read.
And I was warm.

No one hurt me there, or tried to
wish me away.

Gladly, I bowed my head to offer thanks
when all the meals were served.

*

October Eclipse

Blackbirds, like shiny boxes, peck the grass.
Sun falls through the kitchen glass and makes fog.

Yesterday, you said the azalea leaves are dry as crisps,
fish bones rattling in the wind.

The squirrels are frantic in wet trees now. Their mouths full
of walnuts fat as hearts turned hard and brown.

Tonight, you’ll be Father Time. I’ll be Mother Earth,
a wreath of plastic flowers in my hair.

November will round the corner soon enough,
like a dark carnival or flood.

For now, though, wet leaves and sun mango the light.
And we are still part young.

*

Michelle Hendrixson-Miller received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, where she served as poetry editor of Qu Literary Magazine. Her poems have appeared in Thrush, One, Josephine Quarterly, Poems and Plays, The Moth, Adirondack Review, Still, The Fourth River, Harbor Review, Mudfish, The Museum of Americana,2River View, and others. https://mraehendrixsonmill.wixsite.com/mhmpoems

October by Tyler Michael Jacobs

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OCTOBER

This sky is sleeping
Except the light on the walls. I want to feel
The way light ribbons across rays
Of New England asters and swaths of goldenrod.
A field of crisp air forgives me for wanting
To drape myself in birdsong. Now,
I want to feel something, anything.
If every slender wrist has felt a thumb
Slip back and forth, to love like autumn
Cruels a room
Only feels like enough.
How tender this falling:
A leaf feels it has been falling headfirst
Its entire life. The trees hold the wind
While there is still time.
Had I been this joy,
Maybe I could have loved myself too.
A bee keeps returning in full sun
as if to share in something so sweet, and I let it
Rest on the rim of my beer glass.

*

Tyler Michael Jacobs is the author of Building Brownville (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His words have appeared in Pidgeonholes, Sierra Nevada Review, Thin Air Magazine, White Wall Review, Funicular Magazine, and elsewhere. His poems have also been featured on Nebraska Public Media’s Friday LIVE! He is a first-year poetry MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University.

October Now by Weslea Sidon

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October Now

The sky is bright, the air is warm
the sun is still on my side,
the promises the garden made in June
came true, mostly, at least they put the energy out.
It takes a lot to grow into something useful.

Now for the pulling and the picking up,
stacking litter, piling weeds,
finding lost trowels.
It is easy to get lost here
to hide from the work at hand.
Take one more peek beneath the grape vine
begin to coil the hose.

*

Weslea Sidon is a poet and musician living in West Tremont, Maine. Her poems have appeared in several literary publications and anthologies, most recently Paumanok Transition. She is the author of The Fool Sings, published by Rain Chain Press.