Lunchbox Poems

• 2024-06-20

  

• 2024-06-12

  

• 2024-06-04

  MY FATHER AND I DRIVE TO ST. LOUIS FOR HIS MOTHER’S FUNERAL AND THE WILDFLOWERS

  There is a story in a journey / a son takes / with his father / that circles back to a field / of flowers / that stays a field of flowers / only in name / & because our eyes pass them along a road / so / there is a point in a journey when all the years blur the same / Meaning / the details it took to get there / & the details it takes to get back— / & there is a point in a journey when a volta pivots inside a narrative / when a father turns the wheel over to his son / & this is the moment when a father releases his child / to the wind / & the boy learns to fail / or the boy learns to fly / & we desire shade from our oak trees / where the robins watch their nests / & sure / this could be a story about how a parent never rests / once his hands relinquish control / & my father ever slept along the journey / (though / I’d seen him doze) / & we mostly ate fast food / & paused for gas / so / there is a point in the journey when the journey becomes a hill / a literal slope / somewhere between a field / & Texas / where our bodies enter a highpoint / & there is a tension / & / peripheral to a son / & / peripheral to a father / are likely flowers blowing in a wind / that could be from anywhere / & we could be anyone / & I could ask for anything / so there is a point in a journey where I become a magic lamp / & my father becomes a field of wildflowers / & the thing about a magic lamp is / how gently the hands tremble / once the wheels turn slowly onto the shoulder / so there is a point in the journey / where I pull off the road / & I am asked to exit my vehicle / as if I had a choice / so there is a point in the journey when the frame holds / & the hill stills / more or less its green / & the dandelions become a haven / for the bees to stuff their pockets / with gold / & / by this standard / my father can no longer be likened to a field / of wildflowers / & / the thing about a magic lamp / is / I only get three wishes / & my father is being cross-examined / as I make use of them all / so there is a point in a journey when / who lives to tell the tale / & / from what point of view / become central to the climax / & if the man toting the gun has a third-person limited / & if the plane in the sky has a god’s point of view / I am all out of wishes / & the thing about a journey is / at some point it becomes a prayer / & what I mean is / from this point on / & the man with the gun is all about the math / & see— / what should be viewed as routine / does not start out that way / & what is likely to be believed / requires / neither of us / so / there is a point in a journey when it ends the way it begins / with that which appears different / upon the surface / & the man toting the gun wants to know / if our stories corroborate / & to think / all of this came from my being / too relaxed / from allowing my foot to coast down a hill / while I mistook a field of dandelions to be a field of wildflowers / & that was my mistake / & the plane that was said to have calculated my duration / to distance (before the age of drones) / is not put to a vote / So there is a point in a journey when I return to the math / & I have never been one for arithmetic / so forgive me if my story does not add up / I leave this problem for you to resolve / since I know that you will work through my miscalculation / & the thing about a miscalculation / is how a journey could end / & the thing about a journey ending is / how easy it is to misfire / & what I mean is / how easy it is to begin with a field of flowers / & end / with no flowers at all

  CHAUN BALLARD

• 2024-06-02

  LIFE ON EARTH

  The odds are we should never have been born.

  Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be

  exact. Only one among the 250 million

  released in a flood of semen that glides

  like a glassine limousine filled with tadpoles

  of possible people, one of whom may

  or may not be you, a being made of water

  and blood, a creature with eyeballs and limbs

  that end in fists, a you with all your particular

  perfumes, the chords of your sinewy legs

  singing as they form, your organs humming

  and buzzing with new life, moonbeams

  lighting up your brain’s gray coils,

  the exquisite hills of your face, the human

  toy your mother longs for, your father

  yearns to hold, the unmistakable you

  who will take your first breath, your first

  step, bang a copper pot with a wooden spoon,

  trace the lichen growing on a boulder you climb

  to see the wild expanse of a field, the one

  whose heart will yield to the yellow forsythia

  named after William Forsyth—not the American

  actor with piercing blue eyes, but the Scottish

  botanist who discovered the buttery bells

  on a highland hillside blooming

  to beat the band, zigzagging down

  an unknown Scottish slope. And those

  are only a few of the things 

  you will one day know, slowly chipping away

  at your ignorance and doubt, you

  who were born from ashes and will return

  to ash. When you think you might be

  through with this body and soul, look down

  at an anthill or up at the stars, remember

  your gambler chances, the bounty 

  of good luck you were born for.

  DORIANNE LAUX

• 2024-05-28

  LOVE AND THE MOON

  When I see something beautiful I think of him,

  my friend in love tells me. That’s how I felt—

  for years, stepping outside to see the moon

  tipped like a boat, or a vertical half

  like an open book. Wherever she is,

  I’d think, she also sees this moon,

  and what I meant was each of our hearts

  lifting toward it, the moon like a magnet

  pulling our gaze from wherever we stood on the earth.

  And if we were separate in time, 

  well, the moon doesn’t change. Just the shadow.

  In those years I felt it pinned us in time together,

  wherever we were. The physicists say 

  light doesn’t get old. But now when I see 

  something beautiful, I think of someone

  no longer here. It’s just that beauty

  hurts more now, and I can look 

  at almost anything but the moon.

  NAN COHEN

• 2024-05-26

  

• 2024-05-19

  HUNGER

  The half-moon rises over the path,
                                        a low, sick-sweet note
               and deer bones shine in damp brush.
  
     My shadow slides below the lamps, a hunter
                                          whose hands hang like bagged birds.
  
         It’s dangerous, on nights like this, 
                                         to look for the Lord in his works—
                           when hunger swells in every living thing.
  
         Dragonflies, ravenous, hawk the steaming field.
  Raccoons gnaw crayfish at the river’s edge.
                             A stray dog digs for something dead.
  
         Longing, the Lord must have said,
                will weave through this world’s wet breath—
  
                                                                cricket thrum, feline whine,
                                        water-pulse of babble and brush.
  
     The Lord’s angel is his ache,
                             a tear in the clouds where stars spark through
            to help the owl kill. 

                                               ~
  
  Creation is a relentless rhythm—
                                              a looped song of longing
                           swirled into passing forms—
  
                       the season’s bloom of doomed mayflies,
  sparrows snatching moths by a sycamore,
                              mantis eggs bobbing on a blade of grass,
      the first few hatched and feeding on the rest.
  
  Such fecund, ferocious need
                               throbs in the filaments of feeling things
          and love is not near the heart of this—
  
                                          it is a late, lucky appendage, 
                   unlikely as the life of one lacewing. 
  
                                            ~
  
  The creek wears moonlight like a coat of mirrors,
                           leads me past dumpsters to a marsh’s dark lip 
                 where one swamp rose dips low.
  
          I follow its overgrown tendrils down
  to dream’s glimmer and sluice
                  where the moon makes a wavering road on water,
        shines on fine fish bones—
                  half-eaten, translucent, nudging the reeds.
  
  If there’s a heaven, we will bend
                                 to examine our old selves                and wonder how something so delicate
        was ever allowed

  RYLER DUSTIN

• 2024-05-18

  I AM TRYING TO LOVE THE WHOLE WORLD

  but you can’t keep everything.
   

  You can only enter the sleepless 

               rooms repeating, more slowly
   

  & in alphabetical order 
   

  the names of birds: albatross bunting cormorant dove. Albatross

               bunting cormorant
   

  instead of your dead friends

  don’t you mean?
   

  Mean egret. Mean grackle. Mean humming.

  Keep humming. Keep jay.
   

  Say kingfisher. Say loon.
   

  Say despite the racoons screeching

               all night like blown timing belts
   

  high in the trash trees
   

  while the skeletal fence cats carry on

              their cage match over moonlight.
   

  Say Katie Rhonda Shimi T I mean
   

  mocking mocking
   

             & still we haven’t finished
   

  cleaning out your studio, your drawers

             full of heart-shaped catalpa leaves
   

  sketches of standing ovations

             for melancholic rock stars, charm
   

  bracelets & the chiseled gray

             mountains of Spain, over which
   

  we had yet to fly.
   

  & your laugh like an ambulance,

  & your laugh like the elephant grass.

  JENNY BROWNE

• 2024-05-09

  PORTRAIT OF THE RAIN

  it appears as a hand-kiss, gentle nudge,

  spray of memory: remember

  where you came from, frog.

  or galloping, as a thundering horde,

  to tender unto caesar what is caesar’s,

  until everything flees into the entryways

  under the cover of newspapers

  and briefcases: whoever listens at the open window

  senses that he may be dry, but the weather

  has long since been inside him.

  or how the gutters become musical,

  when laundry lifts off the lines

  and rivers flow out of their beds,

  and the secret scent of earth and asphalt

  unveils itself; when mushrooms, mosses,

  vineyard snails run rampant;

  it makes the outlines visible: where rain ends,

  we begin.

  it treks across the landscape like a circus,

  the spectacle and curtain at the same time:

  scenery loft of the great weather-

  and wandering theaters; bestows upon blonds

  darker hair, and on the bald the radiance

  of billiard balls; to the hens it is a cage

  that doesn’t imprison them. so often divined,

  yet no church is founded on it.

  good ears can still hear,

  if you bend low enough,

  the songs of humpback whales, glacier calving—

  one geyser over north america

  inspires umbrellas to blossom

  from shanghai to rome.

  each drop contains the whole book, water,

  particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world.

  resurrection—the easiest exercise.

  meanwhile it slumbers in car tires

  and from puddles and cisterns

  stares back toward its own origin,

  while the trees for hours and hours

  are immersed in their soliloquies.

  the soothing swoosh between the radio transmitters.

  the wind in the forests yet to come.

  JAN WAGNER

• 2024-05-07

  IT’S THIS WAY

  I stand in the advancing light,

  my hands hungry, the world beautiful.
   

  My eyes can’t get enough of the trees–

  they’re so hopeful, so green.
   

  A sunny road runs through the mulberries,

  I’m at the window of the prison infirmary.
   

  I can’t smell the medicines–

  carnations must be blooming nearby.
   

  It’s this way:

  being captured is beside the point,

  the point is not to surrender.

  NAZIM HIKMET