Tuesday poem #502 : Kirstin Allio : Aphorism I.

 

 

Every woman is inside
Everyman, bathed in blood
Warm background noise the
Dial tone of memory.

  

Every man is an eye
Of the earth, says Frédéric
Bruly Bouabré, but
Not every woman gives birth

  

To herself by a certain
Alphabet, uncertainty how
Most of us feel about dying in the shadows
Of the ribbed pillars of destiny. Not

  

To put too fine a point
On the unknown, knowing
We still have to feed, but
When the child is more nostalgic

  

For childhood than the mother you get
A monster. 89% of survey monkeys
Say interruptions cause connection
To falter. A little

  

More starch per square inch,
The stretch sounds
Synthetic, like
Velcro, reversal

  

Of referent, re-do
Of nature, nurture’s
Aftermath: nothing
That isn’t held holds.

 

 

 

Kirstin Allio’s books are the novels Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa) and Garner (Coffee House), and the short story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc). Her writing appears recently in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Bennington Review, Changes Review, Conjunctions, Epiphany, Fence, Guernica, New England Review, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She has received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She lives in Providence, RI.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #501 : Jaeyun Yoo : Empty Nest

 

 

 

 

Wednesdays after school
in the cavernous study
we deciphered hieroglyphs of mathematics

X marked the spot where we mapped
father – daughter 

until test flights over the curfew
the arthritic car piled with boxes
my bedroom pale as a skull 

next spring, I was a migratory bird stopping for a feed
I sat sun-swollen on the patio with poetry
calculus limp on my tongue
you were silently squatted on a tatami mat
windows shut to the backyard 

each year, my feathers land on foreign ground
you dig damp dark burrows

each year, I fetch tree branches for a nest
you build a wooden cross

each year, I think you are ready

to burst golden like a lotus flower
but you weave a shroud out of moss
shovel dirt on your craggy face
let the weeds grow over

 

 

 

 

Jaeyun Yoo is a Korean-Canadian poet and psychiatrist living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, also known as Vancouver. Her work has appeared in Canthius, The /tƐmz/ Review, Prairie Fire, Grain, CV2, EVENT and others. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. She is a member of Harbour Centre 5, a collective of emerging poets. Their collaborative chapbook, Brine, was published in 2022. @jaeyunwrites on Twitter.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #500 : Ben Meyerson : Granada After the Correlation

 

 

 

In the least measurable world, mind
squalls in a shred of swamp, recuses
each pearled dreg, nips at its own heels –
but moves, refuses walls, pretends
not to know nature even as morning shifts
docile in its stall and huffs
to its own ends: a crick
in the aubade, waking up stiff,
tongue all stuffed into a calligram,
knotted with sweetness and bile –
it is thus that the measureless day
imprints itself, bray
onticology or hyper-object all you like. 

A wealth of speedbumps on our way
to mortifying the surface of dazzling change –
pity the mind, rattling on and on
with a bog-moon above to fortify
its dim aegis: we prod it silent
not a moment too soon.

I am in the clasp of a different morning,
where sun begins to seep through every slit
in the closed door and the houses outside
are impregnated with flowers –
you can smell it from the streets and
the terrace bordering the other room,
where threadbare towels dry on the line
and dogs sigh in the dizzying heat.

We do it like this: we insert the subject
into an impossible image and watch
it yearn, watch its ears prick, the faint burns
where air meets its skin – we tell it
that it is a mind; we ask it for nothing.
We wonder what it can see.

Warm air pierces the curtains, sweetens
my nostrils with gusts of plant slough
flung in estuaries against a dam of attention – 

I have already felt the breath burst from
your nose as you pace the garden
outside my window. 

You hum to yourself.

I can hear your lashes
like gummed cicada wings in the waning dark.

 

 

 

 

Ben Meyerson holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and an MA in philosophy from the Universidad de Sevilla. He is currently a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of four chapbooks: In a Past Life (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016), Holcocene (Kelsay Books, 2018), An Ecology of the Void (above/ground press, 2019) and Near Enough (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming in 2023). His poems, translations and essays have appeared in several journals, including Interim, PANK, Long Poem Magazine, El Mundo Obrero, Great River Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust+Moth, and Pidgeonholes. His debut collection, entitled Seguiriyas, is forthcoming from Black Ocean Press in the fall of 2023.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan