Tag: self

Just Be Yourself by Susan Kress

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Just Be Yourself

I’m not my self today, you say,
and I wonder what self
you have on. Is it the evening
silk one or the shabby bathrobe one—
maybe the weeping one
that curls up with the cat.
Sometimes I think the self
is like a colander, the bowl that holds
and lets things go at once.
Of course, if you are Whitman,
your self is everywhere. No borders,
no divisions. There isn’t anything
that isn’t you. And if you’re Dickinson,
you’re Nobody. Nothing seems
straightforward any more.
If you take your self in hand,
talk your self out or into something,
who is talking to that self?
And if you let your self down,
beat or pick your self up, who in heck
is doing all that heavy lifting?
Pull your self together or Why
have you let your self go we might say
(heartlessly) to someone who
is leaving pieces everywhere
like shards from shattered mirrors.
You can wear your self out
with thoughts like these.
Sometimes, I think life
would be easier as a creature. A rat
maybe. Better still: a cow.
Cows seem content to spend
the day in steady rumination,
satisfying elimination. Who,
with selves that circle, split, run
out of sequence, doesn’t
glance with envy at the cow?
O, for a single self, a self
that shrugs off costumes,
masks, duplicity, and double-
dealing. But then—perhaps when
clouds pile up, the night comes on
too fast, and all the other cows
are sleeping—even the cow
lows in her plaintive voice:
Who am I? Who are you?

*

Susan Kress was born and educated in England and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her poems appear (or are forthcoming) in Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Gyroscope Review, Nimrod International, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, South Florida Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, and other journals. Her poems have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

You’re a long shot by Greg Stewart

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You’re a long shot

Your genetic code is a hand-me-down
from your 2 parents, theirs from
your 4 grandparents, and theirs from
your 8 great-grandparents.
Just 20 generations ago, you had
a million ancestors behind you —
a river basin sprawling
back to the start of life.

Your body is made up of a billion atoms
for every grain of sand on earth.
They were born inside ancient stars,
and briefly pass through you before
moving on downstream. Each year,
half your atoms wash away
and are replaced.
So that every 10 years
you are refreshed
as a whole new person.

Your code and body
are two streams colliding
briefly converging to
churn a musky mix of riverbottom mud.
The stink of biology
doing the messy work of you —
all the you there is.

I hope we’re not conscious for too long
after we’re dead
or we’ll be mortified with regret
over everything we could have done
in that one brief moment
when the universe lined up for us
and we were alive.

*

Greg Stewart is a Canadian poet based in British Columbia. His work has appeared in ONE ART. He writes and performs regularly, and has been featured three times at Poetry Floodlight in New Westminster, where he remains active in the local poetry community.

Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon

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Swedish Death Cleaning

“You can’t have everything.
Where would you put it?” ~ Steven Wright

My black hole of a bedroom closet
still holds long-impossible size eights,
tattered protest posters, slumped purses,
homemade Halloween costumes,
and hopeful eyes facing the future
from a box of black and white portraits.
Each object a doorway into realms
Where light no longer escapes.

I’ve already donated the strappy red dress
I never wore, the tie-dyed jumpsuit I did.
I gave stacks of sweaters to a friend who felts.
Sewed a sturdy quilt out of old jeans.
Cut squares from shirts too torn to donate
to patch shirts I still wear.
Time here distorts.
Decades seem mere seconds.

My arms are full with an enormity
possessions never encompass.
There’s no packing for an event horizon
but, oh look, here’s a child-decorated pillowcase
and there, a poncho I made from a shower curtain.
From this dense gravitational field
I work to excavate my own buried self
from all the women I didn’t become.

*

Look At Them Fly

My grown children may as well be
prop planes pulling banners
I squint to read
as they loop high in the sky.
They land for a bit, accept hugs,
tolerate a meal or two, some even
take leftovers I urge on them.

My love is larger than
any of us can fully bear.
It’s a fact immutable as the moon
drifting farther from Earth
at the same rate fingernails grow.

Before they were born in the usual way
I calculated with the wrong variables,
equated love with grief, but becoming
a mother to these exact marvels
erased all that. I cannot do the math,
only exult in these four.

Here I am on the ground they fly from,
my hands out offering tomatoes I’ve grown,
hot sauce I fermented, the pie I hope
is the one they still like.

*

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, leads writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura is the author of four books and was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year. Her background includes teaching nonviolence, writing poetry with nursing home residents, facilitating support groups for abuse survivors, and writing sardonic greeting cards. Laura lives on a small Ohio homestead where she and her husband host occasional art parties and house concerts. lauragraceweldon.com

Aubade to Self by Robbie Gamble

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Aubade to Self

morning’s gray filaments
pry the curtains
as I lie still
floating a prayer
for a scant of endurance,
compassion, generosity—
selfishly, of course
but for all of us

because despair is
a husk of resistance
it means we are all still
counting the casualties
it means the pain
remains tender

*

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Post Road, Sheila-Na-Gig, Whale Road Review, Salamander, and The Sun. He is the poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he divides his time between Boston and Vermont.