Poetry – Page 4 – Novus Literary and Arts Journal

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.

Four Steps to Disappearing

Written by Brendan Bense. Posted in Poetry.

There is nothing all people do

but glide into the uneasy weight

of death. Here, too, we start:

You are eight and sun dries

off the body before you’re out of the water.

At thirteen another impermanence,

knowing fireflies are alive by the way

they blink. You place a hand over

your chest and feel it rise and tumble.

Twenty, a formal dance

with a woman and how a night

can’t swallow ballroom chandelier fire.

Finally, how stars dissolve into

water and air and dark: maybe with sound

but not anything you will hear

until it has allowed itself to catch up to you.

Beusselstraße

Written by Patrick Maynard. Posted in Poetry.

It stands high along the tracks,

Skinny and awkward,

Three stories,

Graffiti-covered,

Half-timbered in a city of stucco and brick.

It stands high above the long carriages,

The wagonnen, headed to Hamburg, Hannover, Bremen.

Who lives here now?

An old station man, using his cane to get up the stairs?

Ten spiders, observing ancient railway schedules?

A teenager from Poland?

A boy brushes his teeth before his date, spits off the bridge over the moving train.

He will stop at the grocery store on the way to the apartment,

Buying peaches, olives, an avocado.

He walks south now, toward the river.

To My Cousin Josh with Nothing

Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.

I didn’t look under the hood the way you would have.

An old Ford hardtop wedged between two trees

in a cornfield as if it was parked there before

the trees took root. The backdoor jimmied open.

The steering wheel in place, but the pedals gone.

I was walking a shortcut to the hospital

because you were dying again. You’d been dying

for so long it was hard to say from what.

Ten years ago it was liquor, which led to diabetes.

Now add cancer. Now pneumonia. The first drops

of rain nickel-and-dimed the windshield but lacked

the body to run the glass. They sat like solo climbers

bivouacked at night on a bald granite face.

I stretched out on what was left of the backseat,

the springs squealing at the pressure points

as if to complain of the various weights of me.

Meanwhile you were adding up to less and less.

Forget about muscle––your skin waxed down

to a windowpane, your limbs thickest at the joints.

And as I lay in that totaled car waiting out the storm,

all I could think about was how you waterskied

at the family cabin years ago, how you slalomed

with a natural’s ease, held the towrope one-handed,

carved walls outside the wake, threw eight-foot sprays.

And after a few days in the emergency wing

getting half your liver removed, followed by

that short stint in rehab, I remember the last time

you tried––the same old life vest so oversized

you had to switch it for a kid’s one. The easy

bruises on your shins. The towrope assuming

from your hands like a loon before you could lift

above the wake. What happened to that athlete?

That engineer? What slipped from your hands

and skidded across the lake and sank? I couldn’t sleep.

The wind picked up. Raindrops veined into each other

and pooled, sluicing down in chutes to the hood.

And honestly Josh, I wish I could say the surgery

failed, or the cancer spread, or the pneumonia found

a foothold. I wish I could tell you I never made it

to the hospital to see you. That in the end it rained all night

and bad luck struck one or the other of the trees

I was under. I wish I could believe the reasons

the preacher gave at the funeral, or the mumbles

of our mothers under the motor-drone on the drive home.

But the truth is, you lived on for years. Thinned

your six-foot-four frame to ninety-five pounds

fully dressed and wet. You didn’t lose a fight.

Nothing was after you. You moved up to the family cabin

to avoid paying rent, smoked Camels

with the curtains drawn and the television on,

though you didn’t watch it, and one day you were gone.

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.

Two Questions, One of Which You Answered

Written by Brendan Bense. Posted in Poetry.

Here’s the first, if you ever see this:

what would you leave behind, stranded

in the woods, and given the option?

I anticipated pragmatic survivalism:

cutlery, tents, loose ends, a t-shirt.

The last time we saw each other,

all I remember is asking the second:

are we so sure

that the sun, just before

it climbs over the forest top in the morning,

is really anything worth rising for?

And to both

I imagine and remember you say

it’s the body you’d leave behind;

and for that we rise, too,

for the body we left

behind.