May 2021 – Page 13 – Novus Literary and Arts Journal

Abandoned Anonymous

Written by Laine Derr. Posted in Poetry.

In a circle, they don’t smoke,

drink coffee, or speak of bravery.

All he left was debt

When I was born, she stopped looking back

He gave the smoke

She told me Wonder Woman was Santa Claus

I remember the dust, the wings

She was made of homemade eggnog and cheap whiskey

His anger was a butter knife

When she wasn’t right, I was wrong

I imagine him seated at a shopping mall

Her smile went with her

We were kept hungry like feral cats

I was born laughing, until I was slapped

In failure, he succeeded

Welcoming pain,

they wait, they listen.

Among the Storm

Written by Grant Young. Posted in Poetry.

You build a home

among the torrents

I watch you in the deep end.

You were not born

in this storm – it hijacked

You and proliferated, raised

its children in Your lungs

to take the wind out.

A storm isn’t normally

the antithesis to wind.

A storm doesn’t normally

whitewash Tacoma, or the streets

leading from church to home

stalking Manuel Ellis

to take the wind out of his lungs.

A storm doesn’t normally

bring riots, though maybe storms should,

or maybe there shouldn’t have to be

a storm

for us to riot.

In this storm, hail cannons

down like rubber bullets

while forest fires

pepper spray the West.

A thrown water bottle

becomes a line of riot shields

charging into umbrella defenses.

The storm comes from all directions now and

my dog, my house, my street,

my 11th and Pine, my Seattle

does not sleep at night.

How can this be place for home?

You teach me about trees:

how they exchange nitrogen

among root networks,

nourishing one another.

How when danger pierces bark,

chemicals communicate hostility,

floating through the air as if

a smoke signal became pheromones.

How the sturdiest Sitka spruces

stand tall amongst forest fires

and remain alive.

We can do more than simply remain

You tell me. You reach a hand to me

and with gracious gritty grip

pull me along. You take me

to the beach and make me cake.

You tell me this storm is in all of us,

but we can take shelter

in each other.

So we build a home

in a gale-less storm

on this obsidian

edge of time.

We fashion a hull of

thick steel and a Sitka

spruce mast. People

are windless, but You puff

our canvas sails with Your stormed lungs.

We puzzle over 5000 pieces of

I love you

into a painting of a family

with a dog who’s too cute.

Together, we do more

than simply remain

in the space You created for

our home among the storm.

Southern Cross

Written by Diane Thiel. Posted in Poetry.

It wasn’t what drew me there,

but when I saw the Southern Cross

that year, visible all night down under,

turning with the hour,

it took me home, to my childhood

when I didn’t quite realize

what had risen

just above the horizon,

but I knew enough to know

I could keep that starry kite

if even for a little while

up above the boundary line.

I didn’t know it then, how special

the sighting was, my place in the world

far south enough to see it,

my hometown floating on the edge.

People looked right at the cross

and didn’t seem to notice

it was there

before it dipped below again.

Almost like a secret, that made it mine.

It was something I could turn to,

away from all the trouble,

and call my own.

Novus Interview with Anders Carlson-Wee

Written by Jamie Fleming. Posted in News.

Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of THE LOW PASSIONS (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and DYNAMITE (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, BuzzFeed, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, New England Review, The Southern Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, he is the winner of the 2017 Poetry International Prize. His work has been translated into Chinese. Anders holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents.

C₁₀H₁₂N₂O: Ode to Serotonin

Written by Dakota Delk. Posted in Poetry.

The therapist said you need sertraline.

Generic brand is still more

than you can afford. You cough up the tens anyways,

dropping them from fingers overworked

To the bone, nails chewed to skin

Near cerulean capsules quiet the hot static

Pulses, obsessive thoughts

Brain always switched on

like the flickering bathroom bulb your mother stands under

as she scrubs her hands raw. You wonder if they are sticky

like the candy-coated words she pours

from her lips or the slick lies she has been told.

The therapist said you need sertraline.

He said you have your father’s

eyes, as though your honey browns

are covering up his icy blues.

The man with the prescription pad

Stares at you and says that you are not whole.

He thinks your fizzy chaos is more

like your father’s live wire

Than your mother’s high tide.

Your brain quiets more in the silence

Than under the influence

of a licensed dealer like him.

You still look in the mirror

and you take the pills to hide

the blue underneath

your irises.

Shallow Water Over Sand

Written by Jesse Graves. Posted in Poetry.

I have seen this color before, in my mother’s shift-robe,

on old dresses her mother might have worn, blue-green,

delicate shade, like shallow water over white sand,

now in my palm, on a button I picked off the pavement

in the grocery store parking lot, color of thread stitched

into quilts made by hands born the century before last.

Month: May 2021