Poetry – Page 7 – Novus Literary and Arts Journal

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.

The Sensibilities of the Smallest Nesting Doll

Written by Brianna Bruce. Posted in Poetry.

I was a child

of cool-patterned skin

Nesting doll in winter attic

Layers of paper-mache

In a frosted cocoon.

I gazed at lightning windows

While the others wept at darkness

My mouth was kissed by thunder rumbles

As my unshaken palms soothed trembling walls.

I knew the transience of playgrounds, fast friendships

That only spanned sandboxes, ending with setting sun.

I saw fate as fact in action: three dogs, then eldest left.

Mortal math, quick tears melted into matter-of-fact.

Dense glue decayed under hurried paint when

Spring discovered gold in the sun. Paper

Cracked hairline fractures until I

Burst out and began to bloom.

County 19

Written by Anders Carlson-Wee. Posted in Poetry.

I twist in my seat beside the woman who picked me up

on County 19, reaching back to help her son

eat his Happy Meal. I fly a french fry through the air,

thinking how weird it is to hitch a ride on the road

I’ve driven so many times with my dad––

the route between our house and the old folks home

where Grandma lasted alone for fourteen years.

Each time we visited: the veins wider, bluer,

the ankles thinner, the distances between bedsores

diminished, the cheer my dad convinced himself to feel

as he repeated the litany: I am your son.

This is your grandson. We’re so happy to see you.

The woman asks me where I’m going

and I say as far as you can take me,

but as we pass the old folks home I tell her to pull over.

The boy is finished with his Happy Meal and now

he points at the bruise on his elbow and says Ouch.

His mom nods at him in the rearview as I get out.

That’s right, she says. Ouch. There is the low roofline,

the sign with a bible quote in changeable letters,

my grandma’s old window as blank as it was

when she lived here, some earth dug up

in the bordering cornfield for construction

of a new wing. I think about barging through the doors

and demanding to see Elizabeth Wee, making

some kind of scene. I think about setting up camp

in the hole in the cornfield and refusing to leave.

But instead I wander the grounds for awhile.

I lie in the parking lot’s grass island and watch

the cornstalks feather the road with lank shadows,

the sunlight dipping down into the tassels.

I want speed. I want new people. To ditch

this slow sanitary drain of golden light,

my pastor parents and their immovable faith,

this town’s brown river exhausting its banks.

Elizabeth is underground. So is my cousin.

Stones like polished teeth in the family plot.

In the twilight I walk back to the shoulder

and catch a ride from a farmer hauling a trailer

stacked with hay bales three-high. When he asks me

where I’m going I say as far as you can take me.

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.