Journal

No Reason

This morning for no reason at all
joy wells up inside me,
joy beams from my eyes
and radiates from my fingertips,
everything blesses me
and I bless everything in turn
like a lazy savior signing heavenly invoices
without even reading them.
It’s a kind of madness, friend,
because I have money troubles,
I have family troubles the same as you
and planet Earth has human troubles
as on any day the sun rises.
Joy must come from one of those
hidden dimensions the scientists
are always yammering about,
a compactified place
filled with compressed infinities
that leave no room for ordinary misery.
When an impossibly minute piece of joy
leaks out, it transforms
the nearest being for what seems
an eternal moment.
This morning, for no reason at all,
that being is me
 

Ode to the Poplar

Such modest ambitions, to grow only up,
not out, reaching for the sky
and sometimes getting to one-hundred-sixty-five feet
with up to an eight-foot trunk
like a giant green-and-brown snake standing on its head.
You are easy on the eyes but provide little shade,
catching Monet’s attention without blocking his light,
useful for making into almost everything
from toothpicks to pallets to snowboards,
and yes, matchsticks, so that after death some of you
can return to destroy so many others
planted too close together like husbands and wives
who hated each other but already bought the burial plots.
Your cousin the cottonwood has leaves that twist and shimmer
in the sun, and so do you, each one a bright green bulb
blinking on and off, transfixing the eye with patterns
that constantly shift without becoming anything in particular,
yet the overall effect is of stillness in the midst of change,
and the louder their rustling, the more one can sense
a quietude at the core of you, a place
that fires and saws and leveling winds cannot touch.
All at once I am ashamed of the toothpick in my hand,
and let it fall to the ground without touching my teeth.

 

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Fiction, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Senior Editor of Exacting Clam. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press. His latest poetry chapbook is The Sound of One Hand Slapping (2022) from SurVision Books (Dublin, Ireland). He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Mother Worship

1.
We’ve come too far to turn back now.
The blue camas shimmering like a pluvial lake.
We dig with a stick their roots
Put them into baskets and take them to the river
to be pummeled with river stone and baked
into hand cakes in hot rock ovens.

If everyone knew what we knew
it might spark the engine of creation.
Rewards for learning life skills
are a delicacy in fast food alley.
That flash of lightning unwitnessed among stars
reason enough to worship here
instead of there.

Auntie Em danced white sheets into a ball
as cumulus climbed dark and threatening
over a small farm in Kansas.
We battened down the hatches
locked windows and secured doors
and the witch rode the wind
on a windmill bike.

Where did the storm leave you?
It left me on the dry side of the Cascades
in the Great Round that was once a lake
like Summer Lake with sandhill cranes
wading into the shallows and mountain bluebirds
flittering in the willows.

2.
Our mother never gets enough credit
for seeing us through the hard times. It takes
conscious effort to look back sometimes
to where we started in her arms
near the beat of her heart.

The land cannot stand up to these claims.
I fall backwards into an interior sea
slow dancing with moonlight on a cold plain
shagged with juniper.

“Not heaven on earth,” my mother says,
“heaven is earth.”

David Memmott has been living and writing in the Pacific Northwest most of his life. His work explores views of the American West both rural and progressive. The collection Lost Transmissions includes the long poem, “Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West,” a finalist for the Spur Award. Recent publications include poems in Weber: The Contemporary West, Gargoyle and basalt. His digital art can be viewed in the Midnight Garden at davidmemmott.com

It Was the Summer of Hard Tomatoes

sucking into themselves like I shied
inward when asked, How
is your father? like my father’s shoulders

collapsed toward his ribs.
I rubbed them softly
while mom magneted
Do Not Resuscitate

to the fridge. I learned
to sleep everywhere—plastic
chairs, a bench at the end
of his hospital bed,
even with the fourth of July
outside, helicopters daily
landing on the roof. I pulled

food into myself with a new
desperation—dark pudding with skin
on top, papery rice noodles,
fresh cherries until
I was sick. In the last days

his mind went back
to work. He worried about the concrete
truck waiting, asked my mom to feed
his crew, fell asleep exhausted from
cleaning out the shop. I watched

his hands move in his sleep, his lips
fretting measurements. It’s OK, my mother said,
just let your father work.

Stacy Boe Miller is poet laureate in Moscow, Idaho. You can find a short bio here. This poem was first published in the Bellingham Review, June 2022.

 

Frijoles Negros

I comb my sieve for pebbles. Set beans to soak.
Ready cast-iron—in Cambridge, as in California.

Listing winter days, the tap of my knife is a mantra;
an onion’s Saturn rings cleaved into a thousand

milk teeth. I send them all, spitting
into the pot’s shimmering fish-eye. Holy, almost

the groan of each crude batch, grown upon parings
and dregs and slow as a gold-miner’s sourdough

sponge. The aromatics of place, of time, absorbed
with always room for a whim. I watch

my improvisations wither into thick, black
butter. And so it goes—my ego settles

whenever I sing a fresh pot. Mind flat as the igneous sheet
that guides a redwood stream around the canyon’s bend.

Now, as then, I long to be lightened, gently rolled
into place, splayed open to the thrill of currents.

I comb my sieve for pebbles. To hand, I have only the residue
of pantry jars, the sour rind of a muzzy winter orange.

The pot is left wanting a shaggy bouquet of laurel,
leaves stripped from the crook in our path. Hung up

over a stove thick with eucalypt
scent. Flush with fog.

Kathryn Moll is an architect and California native. Her text-based drawings—collaborative
works created under the name modem—have been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts in San Francisco, and the Cooper Union in New York City. She lives with her family in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tomato Ghazal

Every year we wait for the summer’s first tomato.
We lived in little sunshine with a thirst for tomato.

Not always red, often orange, black, even chartreuse,
swollen, almost ripe, then rain and a burst tomato.

No plant, however sturdy, can pour enough energy
into more than a few gorgeous, terse tomatoes.

Bred down from horse nettle and nightshade, their lineage
all poison, the sharp fruit bites back, a cursed tomato.

Halloween we’d squeal, toss sulfuric eggs, water-
balloons and a full rotten hearse-load of tomatoes.

I harvest to the very last. My tortured plants,
skeletal, hang by root in dark cellar. Worst tomatoes.

 

My Walks Were Often Barefoot

We were the only philosophers
the farm town could find.
The course, upper division and by
invitation, was in, we joked,
Applied Existentialism. Fidgety,
we shifted then slumped around
a seminar table in the tallest tower
above a black creek of sweet

shadow. The class project was to
save Professor Tiedeman’s life
or at least stall his suicide until
we met again. Three decades later,
true to his taunt, on credit he bought
a shotgun and returned to his hotel room,

and our incomplete became failure.
Outside, on the path between oak trees, in
the shade along the creek, the goal
of my amateur Socratic Dialectic
was sex, in whatever way she or he
or they might find me. I was in love

with Camus and Lorca and where
they kissed I was born their one child
by sunlight. My brief but lacey
etude with the beauty Melody
was clipped when she cleaved
to a better thinker given to birds
and Spinoza, her logic
like a lilting syllogism. Our study circle

was sure we knew nothing
because of dreams and then
we drank. Often in dreams.
A Golden Age. We were all alive.
Our Arts & Crafts always involved
swizzle sticks. We had no one to mind us.
Tiedeman recited the Scholastics,
chided the Stoics, and in

an Ad Nauseum churn,
an Eternal Return, we refuted
Heraclitus every Thursday
at four as we waded into the same
current, tepid as dirty
dishwater. A boy, I grew bored. Out
the high yet narrow windows,
too narrow to leap, but where I
could imagine walking out onto
the air, I watched, what? Light
dissolve into her grainy elements?

Light disrobe and lay her cold gown
upon the grey Sierra? I would never
remember how night ended, who
invited me over or in, or left the bed
in moonlight.

John C. Morrison lives in Portland, Oregon. His first book, Heaven of the Moment, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. His second book, Monkey Island, was recently published by Redbat Books. He teaches at the Attic Institute and is also an associate editor for the fabulist journal of literature, Phantom Drift.