Poetry – Page 4 – Novus Literary and Arts Journal

VALENTINE SWEET CROSSES AT THE MOUTH OF THE HIGHWAY

Written by Cleo-Valentin. Posted in Poetry.

High school feels overgrown and unsteady. A doggy pants in the car window,

and so many things are on their way to me. I put my hair up and

expect a halo. I’m here now, and for what it’s worth when I open the window I feel like I fit

within. I see numbers growing brightly, a catch in my breath as I spy a little lucky patch of

clovers. Spotted and friendly.

Nothing is a waste! I’m cooking rice and juggling so much within the palms of my head.

A plush membrane unfolds like the tongue of a pearls within. Do you go to school? Normal

right, like a normal person? Do you know where you’re going? Do you think yourself deserving

or did you fit yourself inside their pocket lining, soft and sighing in a tone only sweethearts hear.

This guy sits at the head of the table and has the nerve to tell me that he misses his little

home made in mud. In a way that feels like:

I miss it when the women wore their red little checkered aprons and would

lay down their life on the nearby bus stop for his skin. You miss when

they would wiggle and blush, as you threw a window at an old car. Beer

collects in pools of sweat, a smashed bottle and pleading. She knows this

because she’s heard this before. Not all papa’s are like sweat and stingy

breath filled of onion and tomato, but sometimes the world feels too small

and when you break a mirror for a glass shard it feels like you can do

anything. Now, in case anyone gets too close, I shape my eyes like

daggers and turn my head quick.

I check all around me, and sometimes the shuffling footsteps soft—

of my shadow on bare winter flora frightens me. Usually I’m the one

who strays, and if anything, I’d at least like to get too close to the sun.

You point your fingers to the sun, quick, before it sets!

Late Summer

Written by Jesse Graves. Posted in Poetry.

Late Summer

Afternoons languish like untensed muscles,

like a mind gone slack peering into a screen,

whole days awash in faint light, feint wind,

cloudless blue of old paint, dust-covered.

Time lowers down in the dry grass,

crunches under foot, whispering

softly to mask the speed of its passing.

A crackling hush, a hushed absence.

Warm dry months stretch ahead like waves

glimmering ghostly above the ground,

ocean of air, streaked window of the future.

Tonight’s moon is a waning gibbous,

ever-fading, ever-seeming to retreat.

Orbits break, patterns vanish like ash in water,

vastness and sorrow, oceans of summer,

most ships safely reaching port.

III

Late summer days scatter like money

after a bubble implodes, stunned people

who thought it would last forever

scramble for all their pockets will hold.

The ship of living sails the ocean of time,

some of us dreaming close to the prow,

others below deck, clutching our bags.

Late summer, as though it has already died.

Mostly we lived in great seclusion, far from

events and people of worldly importance.

When the rains finally came, we soaked up

all we could, we mirrored the leaves,

turning our insides up, downsides out,

stretching through multiple contortions

to nourish our blanched bodies, dry roots,

water, seclusion, turbulent screens of cloud.

We pretended to be sleepwalkers, romantics,

anarchists, realists, anything but what we were,

which we never determined, moving about

with eyes closed and hands at our sides,

hoping to feel something without reaching for it.

Money was the great mystery of our days,

which people gave us freely until they realized

we had no way or plan to give it back.

Every summer unreels like another childhood,

terrors of whispered-about corridors,

passageways through shrouded woodland trails,

night hovering within midday shadows,

undersides of leaves, stones, unfound doors.

Always some haunted tale awaiting the children,

doors into darkness locked behind them.

Somewhere out there an ocean, a wave cresting.

VII

Somewhere awaits a shore, a homeland,

ships have been sailing toward it

for centuries, guided by tremulous captains,

steering their crews within sight of land,

before twists and turns of fate drive them

back out to sea, cruel fate, indifferent hand.

The long fingers of summer evenings close

around the wan throats of summer days.

The Doppler Effect

Written by Brian Yapko. Posted in Poetry.

we drown in the grey austro-hungarian rain,

thunderclaps arriving at the hauptmarkt two,

no three seconds after the lightning, you and i

soaked to bone and marrow and i still fail to

grasp why you would choose salzburg of

all places to decide to tell me your truth. here,

on wet, broken cobblestones where you didn’t

catch-stop my fall, my knee bloodied in front of

mozart’s house, near the shops where they sell

tortes and von trapp kitsch; your voice silent, my

brain shrill with resentment and utter indifference

to the baroque churches, the street music, sales on

lederhosen, costumed actors in tricorns hawking

opera. you make us stop at makartplatz number 9

to pay homage to doppler, the physicist who

makes receding stars burn red, and

sirens and voices fade in-out. you respect him. you always

prefer complete strangers. you laugh in the rain

and for the split second difference between sound

and light i watch you and recall joy. you decide to

play a game, you will run past doppler’s house —

some shallow homage to his wave theory, i infer,

to capture in selfie his connection between sound

and motion. you don’t ask me. you run towards

the river, i walk in the opposite direction, limping,

towards the fortress on the hill. you call out to me

but i cannot understand you from the distortion.

Night to Her Birds

Written by Sujash Purna. Posted in Poetry.

on a black piece of paper

more shades of black

gliding, a stream on a map

the doodles, shapes of dreams

in quiet words

float, my traveling birds,

this February canvas

is yours, say the formidable

clouds

eyes of stars, blind

as dyed red hair, a veil

behind a grotto of gloom-

illuminate as I walk

a friend’s house calling

a studio apartment above

a Cape Air office,

eight college kids, a stray cat,

I notice north-south spanning

as if a flag bleached

underneath

as dark red and gray red

conflict for a muse

the birds in unison in a strange voice

call for a hope of a home

they will chase all their life,

with a night running after them,

the mother pleads: stay

I walk inside an aroma down

a stairway, late night curry,

my ears still ringing of that

strange call. A night to her

birds, hope you find what

you’re leaving me for

Canal

Written by Jesse Graves. Posted in Poetry.

Clouds hover low after rain,

steady enough to soften the arrival

of full dark, late spring night.

Children on the Hale Avenue corner

have gone inside, their dog quiet,

curled by the front porch door.

The listening is best early dusk,

with quiet company chosen long ago.

Old sounds return in the settle-down,

loosely-rolled cigarette crackling as I recall

how her voice shivered when first she spoke

her street address those many years back.

Time’s elision, time’s frenetic parade,

nothing suppresses the longing

to live in the pulse of that moment,

freshness filling the canal of the body,

my own heart surging with blood.

The oldest sound is made of breath.

Reverdie

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

It snowed today: at last, I understood

they were not joking when they said mid-May

would still be ice. My tender waterplants

brought up with loss of blood from Tennessee

unrooted, drape the new pond’s depth, and fish

seek what they can beneath the drowning leaves.

And so in Houston: in that summer, I

could not anticipate November frost

and planted tropicals around the ponds.

There’s sadness in a burning leaf, when ice

has broken down cell walls, and loss reveals

deficiencies of structure and design

hidden before by blossoms. I should know

to listen to the voices of a place,

to listen to her voice. But I go on:

tomorrow, miscanthus will line the edge

and give a place to rest, until what sun

this slope can promise quickens my new blood.

VALENTINE SWEET CROSSES AT THE MOUTH OF THE HIGHWAY

Late Summer

The Doppler Effect

Night to Her Birds

Canal

Reverdie

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