Poems
Love Currency by Sara Gronich
we are born with open hands
palms towards the sky
we give and receive love freely
as if no other currency exists
but through heartbreak
and the puppeteer that twists us
bending us backwards
we quickly turn our hands over
with fists clenched
our rough, hardened knuckles protecting us
from the damage we fear
until we don't recognize love
until we don’t recognize ourselves
yet blue eyes and late texts
stolen glances and shaggy hair
slowly grab hold of our hands
cold skin softened by the warm graze of fingertips
inch by inch
and our palms face the sky once more
as our cheeks turn a warmer shade of rose
we fear our palms will not withstand the forthcoming wounds
but we cannot pull away
for the missed feeling of cool air intertwined with our fingers
and the tender titillation of love currency
so we continue forward indefinitely
with open hands
we are reborn
Courage by Jude Cramer
Is it courage to expose my naked skin
to any man within twenty miles
with a beard and an ounce of personality?
Is it courage to find clearness in the tailspin
and erase him without a fair trial,
praying I’ve undone my own immortality?
Is it courage to tell myself I’m erotic,
tantalizing, beautiful, sensual beyond belief
when the words feel jammed down my throat?
Is it courage to spew them still, so quixotic,
and spend the better part of the night posing in my briefs
less for the likes than just by rote?
Is it courage to meet him at his frat house,
knowing his expectations and attraction
and just realizing how far I’ve flown?
Is it courage to obliterate my bounds
for the sake of his carnal satisfaction,
which I’m meant to accept as my own?
Or is it courage to stay curled up under comforting fluff
and wonder who put the torn condom wrapper in my trash can
because I’ve never even split one’s foil apart?
Is it courage to say that my weighted blanket is enough,
that my body pillow is a perfect proxy for a man
when nothing would feel better than a warm beating heart?
Is it courage to speak it, even without strength,
how fucking scared I am? How is it fair
that everything worth having is within arm’s length
but is just too heavy for me to bear?
Metamorphosis by Christian Thorsberg
a golden shovel poem after Emily Doe *
Submerged in the sluiceway of memory’s moist underbelly, where you
secrete supercuts of seahorses, cache currents of curved tails that don’t
tread water without waking riptides, but pray, will come to know,
in bestial irony, a guilt pregnant as barefoot rain clouds – wash me
ashore in brilliant red waves to dimorphic coasts of eggshells, speak not but
whistle the whimpers of leucistic male cardinals, feathers fading – you’ve
felt their flapping wings now traipsing into sea’s white foam, where a voice has never been.
Where goes the love of a widowed cocoon, a butterfly the ectoplasm of hope, the inside
skeletal, a permanent and forgotten evolution. Written in washed over sand, you ask me
as you don’t, a shape-shifting parochial octopus, three hearts nocturnal and
two eyes blind, eight lies swimming and not beached like me. But I grow feet – that’s
now where we find ourselves, a clearing in truth’s patronizing forest, imploring why
the moss refuses to show face in red river or bear its witness as is just, knowing we’re
stronger without need for antlers, does, the biota of courage with silence-wrapped words, here,
where you don’t know me, name written in the sun, it blinds you to see her flying today.
* Golden Shovel: Takes a line from an admirable piece of writing, and uses each word in the line as an end word in the poem. Reading down the last word of each line reveals the original piece.