Poetry – Page 3 – Novus Literary and Arts Journal

Aglio e Olio

Written by Alyssa Ross. Posted in Poetry.

Remember those late buttered

parmesan noodles mother made

when you were young and sick

and needed something simple?

Wednesday’s leftover cold

spaghetti reheated, worried wet

with starched water, sliced garlic,

adding an herbal handful, fever breaker.

Your mother is gone,

I am with you now.

But the bug on the page

crosses my words

with tiny feet, tearing my focus

from your desert past.

I’ll make it today –

just call me Jon Favreau.

Air bubbles surround

browning garlic, aromatic

in your small straw nest.

Sliced so dangerously thin

I clipped my talon

and felt the puncture

as I tossed bits of red pepper

in the hot, black iron.

I swirl the pasta

in your sauce. Minced

parsley, added last.

My tense hand stings again

squeezing summer lemon,

turning everything thick.

I watch your scarlet mouth

waiting on my bed.

Oil coats the corner of your open lip,

dropping your fork

to ask for more.

Moorcroft

Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.

You gave me a ride when I was lost

in Wyoming. Took me to your home.

Showed me your gun collection

you had to go shoulder-deep through

the clothes in the closet to reach.

They were old and unloaded, you told me,

and you didn’t shoot them anymore,

just oiled them and kept them perfectly

clean. I was careful not to flinch

as I watched the double-barrel raise

and train on my face. The tooth hole

you flashed in the grin after.

The spasm in your hands as you swung

the gun and pointed it at yourself

to show evenness. You told me

about doing five years for murder,

asked if I would’ve done anything

different, finding a grown man

raping my six-year-old niece.

I wouldn’t change it, you said.

I wouldn’t take it back. You patted

your heart with your hand.

Family is family, you whispered,

as you brought me clean sheets for my bed.

Movement

Written by W. F. Lantry. Posted in Poetry.

There are no orchids here, and no long shore

teeming with raucous life, no salted wings

rising above the multicolored boats,

no overwhelming breezes, and no tides

rising, impelling everything that floats

to shore or seaward where no warbler sings,

and no palm trees, waving their endless fronds.

Instead there’s only heat: the algaed ponds

cannot reflect the sky or even trees,

birches grown bare above them, whose bare limbs

are falling constantly to riversides,

and floating downstream where a viper swims

in wait, for me or you, and all of these

impressions have combined to replicate

the feeling of an ever closing gate.

I want to leap it, get away, become

something completely other, changed somehow

just by the landscape, as my life divides

between the endless blossom and the bough,

walking in rhythm to a restless drum

to Panama, Maldive, or Singapore.

Planting Seeds

Written by Mariel McSherry. Posted in Poetry.

Fall from my palms, then hit the dirt.

Sink beneath the soil, then begin to cry.

Don’t stop until you’ve given

All of your tears, back to your mother, then

Let her hand them back to you, one by one,

As you move through time.

Collect them like they’re diamonds.

Reabsorb them like they’ll take you home.

Make a sustained effort to understand them, and

When you have enough, begin to

Run towards the sun with everything you’ve got.

Until one thousand leaves sprout from your chest,

Until you’re sobbing fruit.

Great Plains Food Bank

Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.

The wind is in the trees again, and I’m thinking it’s a wonder

the body can move. The way the mother at the Fargo food bank

fingers a can of concentrated juice. The way the line keeps

heaving forward. The way the child tugs the heavy skirt.

My job is to look for the elderly, help them load. Like the guy

who grew up in Oslo and is still trying to make it to Bergen.

It’s a straight shot on the train, he says, but you have to be

in Norway to catch it. I lift his meat and yogurt onto a cart.

I wait as he chooses nine of the least bruised carrots.

The trunk of his car has the smell of dried flowers, and his

baguettes fit lengthwise easily. But before I help him lower

himself into the driver’s seat, and before his hands pass over

one another, turning into the northbound traffic, he tells me

I’m young. Tells me it’s spring. Says I should be out of here,

heading for Bergen. I know he’s right. I know he’s

so goddamn right. I stand as still as I can as he leaves.

Youth and By Ourselves

Written by Christ Keivom. Posted in Poetry.

Consider this and that

It wasn’t meant to be

The thing that is going to

Kill me is already on the inside.

There’s this small grandfather clock

Inside us all-

There are minutes of death.

Just the touch. Just this brief.

Where love slips away with the fare

But who’d ask for it back?

There was a time

I knew you though-

Hands, face, pendulum

And when we finally caught up with history

We were no less crueler than our parents.

Yet we were relentless, forgiving, unconditional

We were direction…in blue…on a road sign

Found everywhere…then suddenly…all at once…

Father. He misses mother and she’s been dead

For 24 years

I haven’t missed you that much and you are

so gone

Then I stepped away from the poem

Mid stanza…

We must have been sexton’s sad pencils to say

Those things back then.

But there are rooms for us now and anniversaries to

Commemorate,

In the perfect city someone has left everything

Including themselves. You. You should

Make sure you date and pen down

All the soft things that we said.

Because everyone will ask when it was,

How it happened- say something about it.

How the night rain spilled all over.

Our lives. Our soft soft and honest lives.