Poem For Quar Or

More Time To Think

by Katherine Beniger

The cusp of sanity is nonexistent but also surprising habitable. 

You think you’re even sort of cozy there but also you’ve been thinking

about other poems and some of them with some actual

danger. For instance what is going to happen to your beloved

haunted house trope when none of your friends can

own a home in their lifetimes because for some

reason that seems pressing now more than ever even though

now more than ever is such a tired expression and you feel

like that too sometimes when you’re honest.

reminder

by Ananya Jain

more walks to the sea 

sitting, and staring, 

watching the waves back and forth 

the waves, go back and forth

the ripples in the water, the froth, the foam. 

sometimes a boat in the distance 

other times, all you can see is mist and fog 

more walks to the sea. 

with friends, with strangers

more walks to the sea, alone. 

more conversations,

with people in the street 

you always think you have enough time. 

it’s a small town, 

you’ll get around to talking

someday? somehow?

small talk is over rated? Or is it? 

going beyond, more than a nod 

more than a smile

have more conversations 

with people you run into, 

in the street. 

more hugs, brushing finger tips, 

holding hands, the need for touch. 

the comfort of certain kinds of crowds 

last year i went to a street ceilidh 

dancing with strangers, 

calves brushing, as you walk 

we need hugs, more than ever 

more frequent, tighter, warmer, 

this winter. 

not having something, 

is the only way you learn

what it is to truly yearn. 

in this year of absences, 

trying to count, 

the small

tiny 

things 

that 

exist.

Camera Lucida

by Margaret Mitchell

A beam gilded in nostalgia–

once I held that I could

disappear in time,

a delicate frame

a chain of strawberry blossoms.

I have lived in a world framed in light

and images, the negatives

receding beneath the surface

in heavy folds like the slow enclosing wing

of your arm gesturing west

turning the cavern of your chest afield

as though your body you were sowing

over the crest of that hill, 

recalling the lightness

of the hedgerows in summer.

In those days was a descent– I am sure

you were among the green thickets of 

meadow mice fallen prey to a reminder

of burrows in March, thinking slyly of me,

even if now you cannot recall this.

It was a season the world could already see 

the end of– not in the way of hopeless love, but 

simply that everything is always disappearing

into the geometry of God’s bedsheets.

And if I had not been aware then

of the ligature of thought between its

fastening and unfastening, enclosing and releasing,

a series perpetual and still prospective,

then surely now I am convinced.

While I consider this, I am 

watching the petals of the flowers kept 

in the kitchen since Halloween. The 

palest purple bud is half white and drifting,

and has fallen by now, its frailty becoming 

an afterthought, as though I should have

taken notes all the while its tether unraveled

thought poetically of it

penned it upright to the margin.

This afternoon the space of memories 

is disjointed, which is only natural

as by rearranging the pieces, we will 

the story to forget its own fiction.

The refractions are sharply bitter, though

the love is all there, a wide wound

open agape, encircling

the pace of our steps while we alternated

in falling behind, and overtaking.

Adrift

by Mattea Gernentz

a pale Chicago sky

suspended, like matcha.

it does not dissolve, she said,

does not mix well; it cannot

meet water too hot, lest it scorch,

cannot be swirled circular, only whisked.

panacea, a balm for your body,

but only in this singular fashion.

only this. here you are, only this.

the gaping mouth of July

and the gradient lying between

morning and evening, and we are

caught between, parabolic motion,

cat’s cradle, Newton falling quickly

as one enters slumber. forgetfulness.

decisions must be made, have been made

idle are the hours that lead to sudden

impetus. lost in noise, clarity rears

its sanguine head. and we are adrift again.

Last Things

by Margaret Mitchell

I imagine you in scenes of my life

before you touched it,

in some vision of the future

where I am a child again,

a silence wading in blue black pools

of department store parking lots

mornings just before dawn

the damp dark kitchen of a childhood home,

resigning my cheek to my palm

in a daydream where I pull your voice

out of a symphony, the ambiguous

octaves of mother and father tongues

lifting off of palm leaves and ragged ferns

waxy in the heat of a schoolroom in May,

wondering, will I see you again,

for the first time?

It must have been a vision, a

counterfeit of a glimpse I say I steal,

though you are looking and

letting it burn

your right cheek as we are 

pulling apart the walls of the library

one purgatorial floor up

between the earth and heaven.

I want to be unafraid to spell 

the word love as other than a symptom

of the closed and bound volumes we overlook,

which will come down without mercy 

on the decaying columns and beams,

and when the window-frame falls

in two the bitter word will break the illusion 

of my being separate from the watery mirages

of afternoon, for only inside the 

green and white of the chalkboard walls 

and their signless heaps of dust

is there that tempting distance­.

I was once afraid of being caught 

stealing the sound of you speaking

through songs in foreign languages, 

that could be saying anything,

especially ‘I love you,’

but in someone else’s

secret, sacred way of saying so,

so common and profane

            as the way you tie your shoes

            or lean forward in thought

            while you walk in the garment of

            spring, so natural and premature.

I want to admit to love in the way

that I still do not know how

or what you are thinking

when you leave, I cannot,

cannot keep up with your long shoulders

sloping down the alley just before the street

lamps flicker on, one by one like a marquee

the last vision of you I ever, ever see.

We are always coming and

entering again with the hesitation

and sobriety of the fifth act,

the curtain-close being presupposed

like the velvet black of night, dusty with

stars in an old schoolhouse theatre–

I have learned some of the best

tricks and tropes, that the last kiss, 

even before the final scene,

is really the last; that the prophecy 

is really a prayer, and you must

make of it what you will or won’t.

In my dreams I hear a symphony,

the solemn ringing that I cannot

put to words, and it is a beautiful dream

even if I do not know it and tomorrow

will go searching in my closet, the coffee

shop, the park by the sea, for a 

bell on a string, or a star that looks

like a swirl of dust, and find nothing–

there is nothing

but the reminder that the unreal takes

its seat beside what I know, for the

two are so identical, fleeting and immense.

For you

by Anna Kerr

it’s the morning and you taste like me

consuming big open mouth kisses

to break my fast

to light the room, you strike a match on the side of my ribcage

and hold the flame up inside my chest

my waxen heart melts and the 

liquid warmth drips down,

down,

oil slick, hollow ache

tender and alight 

you’re pretty and i don’t want you to 

stare at my face for too long

but i let you 

allowing in softness has always been hard for me

but i try, for you

there’s a little seedling in my chest

and i’ll water it, for you

i’ve been saving all my springs

and summers, for you

still falling

(Started July 24th, 2020)

by Josephine Hugo

lips quiet, mouths open
I catch on, you notice
kissing me
like we will always be this or closer like you don’t want to shatter the dream There isn’t time to love

all the things I love about you, bursting at the seams

All the things I want to soak into my skin the things you give and give and give
the endless kind words
leaning shoulders

infallible jokes
kisses, ideas
steady hands and open arms
grin curled around my heart
like your hair through my fingers.
Like it was just this morning.
I memorized your heartbeat
under my smile when you pulled me in so that now I can still hear it
beneath your empty sweatshirts
I sometimes sleep with.

I never want to be without you and yet
that is not exactly what I said when I finally told you how I felt about a move.

I wrote a poem called hesitate maybe that would explain

Trust me babe
I wrote another poem about
hopefully someday
you and me lawn-mowing
Don’t ever think I don’t want to share one roof with the person who feels like home
You

I just have knots within myself to undo first.
We would tire of mindreading,
you forced to eavesdrop on my thinking for us both, how exhausting.

So I am still unspinning
lies I told myself to ease past living. I want to give in,
to have this.
I promise
us

I have no doubt I will get there because laughing with you feels like turning the key in the lock of my front door coming home to my favorite person sunlight turning trees not golden

but orange
so gentle yet
more fire than fable. my heart
with you
a greenhouse door
left open in summer never a reason to shut it

you make me blush
harder than the sky at dusk
I used to lust after other
people’s adventures
when their planes tracked across the late afternoon but now the trails only remind me of you
turning all the porch lights out
pointing to stars and elusive comets
That was a perfect example of how
I always think I’ve hit the ground
I never guessed when we met
all this time I’m
still
falling
...

Aubade

by Mattea Gernentz

Flicker awake, o my soul,

like the soul’s starting,

like fawn over grass,

like salmon upstream flings.

Flicker now if evermore;

depart from me not.

Give me a hope I can

sink my teeth into.

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

by Mattea Gernentz

At the Hunterian Museum,

a magpie nest, enclosed

in glass—empty. Preserved

for passerby too caught up

in the map or the museum guide

or the Egyptian sarcophagus 

across the hall. I almost didn’t

pause, nearly absconded

without a second glance.

Did you know that, in winter, 

magpies become vegetarians? 

They build their nests in thorny trees, 

burrowing in with twigs—a vagabond

flash of blue. They do not migrate. Their tail

is half the length of their body. Darling, do you

ever wonder about magpies? One for sorrow,

two for joy. Bygone tradition used to entail

raising one’s cap to them, the magpies. A gesture

extended to make peace, lapsed into absence.

At the Glasgow Necropolis,

the next day, they found me.

Amid towering headstones

and mausoleums, that solvent

cyan flicker, a rummaging among

crisp autumn leaves. I wonder if

it greets or bids me beware, harbinger

of some darker order or despair.

I only wish I had a cap to raise.

Hovering between vibrant totems

of life and death, I suppose

it is Eden as much as anywhere. 

doubled moon,

by Mattea Gernentz

ricocheting like a heart

caught on the rib,

the pull of ache.

we ride, suspended

over the water

that is not the sea

and I grow ill suddenly.

There are too many reasons 

why this might be so.

The oppression of our times

is invisible contagion, virus on tiptoe.

Typhoid Mary, printed, pressed

against the tide of history, floating 

somber over your grandmother’s grave.

We know fear now, not much else.

Autumn is the time of dying,

and I spring awake only

to see the leaves wither

and the sky darken soon.

It has been so before. Still,

how to press on when eddies

drive one back, into yearning,

into remembrance, into

what is no longer the sea?

Myth, Dissolved

by Mattea Gernentz

I am the language of an open wound, the searing hurt, 

and—heaven knows—to love is to cauterize, quickly,

the old brag of my heart.

You used to tell me how Hannibal’s elephants

could travel for days through craggy peaks,

as the salt piled up on your plate,

eyes wide behind horn-rimmed glasses.

All these stories yet I am only I,

legs bruised and riddled with red,

thrashing through the wilderness

of becoming, betrothed to treacherous Fate.

Spurned by the cries of my humiliators,

I am no Orpheus but a thimblewoman from Thebes,

but Penelope weaving their undoing,

but Ariadne learning the maze I’ve been giv’n.