Poetry – Page 10 – Novus Literary and Arts Journal

Still Life

Written by Christ Keivom. Posted in Poetry.

But what night isn’t like this?

I’ve always been since earliest version of life

Silent

Like the dinner table

Carrying tedious things

On my head—

When there are people talking over

And when the voices vanish,

Life comes out of my mouth

Holding a spatula

… it looks just like me

If only I knew how to cook.

I’ve experienced imaginations of the

End of the world.

So I’ve never been happy.

But I’ve been content in small spaces-

Queues, linen back seat of a Hyundai

That tiny store. North face.

A girl’s heart.

Each day I enter life at the same moment:

You alone in your room at midnight

Are in your nighties beautiful

As how people stop to watch the moon together

The night is…what again?

Listen: the slow parade of wind, the fan

And the refrigerator, humming.

The mouse in your cupboard

I have always sounded like this.

Emergence

Written by Christian Umbach. Posted in Poetry.

In the days when Pittsburgh was covered

by clouds of smog, cold-faced walkers

navigated city blocks only by

the neon lights of storefronts.

MAX’S, JAMES ST, WHOLLY’S.

A time when the city was known

only by shoe to sidewalk,

for the upper floors of buildings

were lost to the heavens.

Like ants crossing a large field,

the only way home, to recount

each and every step.

I wonder what it was like

when the smog finally cleared?

I think about families who lived

in cramped row homes, tacted to

steep-sloped hillsides, like patches of glitter

barely hanging on to a 3rd grader’s school collage.

I imagine that first spring morning

and the mother climbing up to the 3rd floor

to clean the modest back windows.

A common task that would leave her white cloth

black with soot, from distant smokestacks

settling over months of invisible rain.

Yet, on this day, as she finishes,

she would for the first time gaze out

to see the entire city, presenting itself

like the blooming of white trilliums.

Steel and glass skyscrapers glistening gold

from sunlight streams, standing tall and silent,

garnering reverence simply by their size and stillness.

And the blue river waters exhaling

a long-held sigh.

Gathering Firewood on Tinpan

Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.

I bundle them against my chest, not sure

if they’re dry enough. Gauging how long

they’ll keep me warm by the thickness.

I step around carefully, looking for

the deadest, searching the low places

for something small and old that will catch.

I pick up the dander loosened

as my father folds his hands, lowers his head.

The rolling thunder on the surface of a nail.

I pick up the cross that seesaws his chest

with each step. The day I lost my faith.

The night my dog ran away and came back sick.

The battery-pump of her final breath.

Still wondering if she left alone,

or if my father walked her out of this world.

Still wondering what he used for a leash.

I go further into the trees and find

more fuel. My friends faded on oxy

and percocet. My cousin Josh

buried young in the floodplain.

My brother and the ways I burden him.

Living it over and over each night.

My father walking into every dream.

My fire not bright enough to reveal anything.

Not even his face. Not even the leash.

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.

I Wake and Feel the Fall

Written by Shannon Lise. Posted in Featured, Poetry.

In the middle of the afternoon I wake and feel

the fall of dark — the shadow on the dogwood

and the shortening of days. It is easier to say

things to the facelessness of crowded places full

of light. You can kill the thing you cherish in a

thousand different ways. In my dream I got

your name wrong; would you leave me if you knew?

In your place there are a thousand other faces

and I don’t know what to say. Long ago you gave

me something from the darkness to hold onto

through the failing of the springtime, through

dimming of our faces — would you make a last

appearance and remind me what it is? You can

kill the thing you’re scared of if you let it walk

you home, if you let it come in close enough —

enough to feel your breath. In my dream I

didn’t know you and you laid down on my bed.