To Impatience
I am impatientfor the sun to rise, for it to set, for the moonto put on its white mask, for the crow to startits daily lessons on love— how to slow it, howto hide in its switchbacks. Why can we love, then undo it?
Poetry
The Plaster
Once, homes were made of plaster, powdered lime and sand, mixed in with horsehair.Where did they get the horsehair? Did they hurt the horse,did they just brush the hair off? Imagine each home,in the middle of the night, sounds of galloping in walls.
My Mother Tells Me She May Have Been the Product of Rape
She says it turns out mice have chewed around the one tree outside her apartment, and now the tree will have difficulty drinking. The landscaper called it girdling. I shudder,thinking this could explain why my grandmother never huggedmy mother. She says mice are pretty sneaky and tend to feed on bark by burrowingabove ground beneath …
An Attempt to Unearth
Maybe laid under two tons of dirt. Miles under sea level,pressed between blocks of cinder or other things that weighdown. Squeezedand held by aluminum cans, Styrofoam cups, half-eaten protein bars,in the trucks haul, only to be lost in compression. Closer, behindthe plaster, the drywall,the paint held up by the walls that brace your house, yourframe. …
In the Tulsa you’ve forgotten
(I knowthe ground still remembers)—That dayyou watchedas guns made the sound of many doors closing.A mother wandered through the fire of bullet and loose-lipped slur,after a small child (dressed both in smoke and panic). You hopedyour voice would raise faster than the shellsif only to ask her what use? You watched as several bodies, dislodgedfrom …
Red Math
Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Widerman’s searingly passionate exploration of colorful memory from a past season will undoubtedly smolder in the reader’s mind long after encountering the poem itself. There’s a careful and idiosyncratic care given to the harmony (and disharmony) of opposites in this tension-filled verse. Listen to Widerman read her miCRo: Red Math Now …
On the Time It Takes to Fire Thirty Rounds from an AR15
Text: One hundred and sixty-five wingbeats from a ruby-throated hummingbird. Nearly six / hundred from that same hummingbird in front of a perched female. Two hundred / and seventy from a ladybug, or thirty less from a monarch butterfly. / Only fifteen from a swallowtail butterfly, loping when compared / to other insects, but it …
This Shit Is Not Interesting
Sometimes when it’s this dark, I light matches & let them burn the tips of my fingers while I watch the flame—this is what I know about memory. It flickers when it feelslike it. I’ve tried to forget that bare- knuckle night I left work,thanking Nick for the quality of his daiquiris. He hada toothy …
Sleeve of Memory
He taught me no two blows sound the same, a ringing still lives in my ear singing a song calledbe quiet. I’ve hidden his gold rings in my throat, nearthe little boy—his face buried in his palms, ready to catchnot tears but the butterflies his stomachspills from his eyes—we share a body that doesn’t knowwhere …
In Praise of This Fear
Before you say anything else, I’ve triedit all—cardio and acupuncture, tryptophan and volunteering, smoothies, SSRIs, and living in the moment, or welcoming this fearin place of the other, one palm rivers sweat into the other, as my dentist takes my jaw to shake novocaine into my rootsuntil it lulls my nerves, wild with panic, an …