Every Day Poems

A Poem A Day

Moon Poem

The Moon by Natalie Crick

by

The Moon

by Natalie Crick

Schools of moths descend,
Pulled in by waves of light when

The fields begin to steam like horses
In the cool

Like the hush of rainfall
After the sun’s marriage to the skies.

From his window, the child can see;
The young moon sulking behind the sun,

Disappearing beneath the moors
With a final sweep of chill.

An actress on stage
Applauded by the throng

One last time,
Only to return again next night

From where it grows to fullness,
A round milky globe
Asking the question:
Who will admire me next?

###

Natalie Crick, from Newcastle in the UK, has found delight in writing all of her life and first began writing when she was a very young girl. She graduated from Newcastle University with a degree in English Literature and plan to pursue an MA at Newcastle this year. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in a range of journals and magazines including The Lake, Ink Sweat and Tears, Poetry Pacific, Interpreters House and Jet Fuel Review. Her work also features or is forthcoming in a number of anthologies, including Lehigh Valley Vanguard Collections 13. This year her poem, ‘Sunday School’ was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Khor Virap by Alex Vartan Gubbins

by

Khor Virap

by Alex Vartan Gubbins

The night fog throws
a black cotton over the trees
as a voice behind the silence
dances off marble walls
from a hole, that tongue
from the earth’s torque
thirsty for threading moon
over the river’s hearty amble,
tenuous, stagnating ebullition
between blues wandering
the glows, where feral crust
lines itself with the eastern rush
in humble recession in the basin.
The moon tide of up & in & back
out to stretch the banks only to lay
a tarp of after-dusk over the valley.
If you stand & feel the power of
the current’s struggle against
your shins, removing calm instinct
to make you reconsider
the honor of shadow, then darkness
will tattoo itself into your heart.
of all you can see, & cannot.

…

[So be it, so be the pale
approach of reflection off the glass
in the dead pools. you’ll have enough
when the dying lamb’s pitch
makes you un-have what you thought of
when dreaming of christened wires
that quiet as you pass through.
you pry open metal in darkness,
testimony of humbling your crawl
so your palms understand
every stone across the river lowland.
what happened and what could still
as you silent-bottle what you
witnessed to get here, the crawling
across the fields, the touch
of cold lips & eyes, some
are open.]
###

Alex Vartan Gubbins was born in Chicago. He has a BA in African Languages and Literature from UW Wisconsin and an MFA from Northern Michigan University. He was the recipient of the 2014 Witter Bynner Translation Grant and a finalist in the North American Review’s 2015 James Hearst Poetry Prize. He’s recently been published in By & By Poetry, Bird’s Thumb, and Tishman Review. He currently lives in Yerevan, Armenia, where he works as a teacher. Avgubbins.net

The Path in Autumn by Tom Sexton

by

The Path in Autumn

by Tom Sexton

From the narrow path I’m on
I can see fall’s first snow on the mountains.
Below the snow, the tundra seems to
be wine spilled by the moon last night
when it began to wane. My step is light.
The leaves on the path are golden.
In the alders, a thrush.
I’m in no hurry to get where I’m going.

###

Tom Sexton is a former Alaska Poet Laureate. His latest collection is A Ladder of Cranes, University of Alaska press, 2015.

 

I’m Living in Oaxaca by Ken Massicotte

by

cheers

I’m Living in Oaxaca

by Ken Massicotte

Hay que soñar para vivir
One must dream in order to live.

1.
I’m living in Oaxaca
but I’m harbouring a canoe.
I keep it high
in the Jacaranda tree,
lightly moored calling
currents north;
buoyed in the purple bloom
of things possible,
I sail the blue moon.

High in the Sierra Madre
daily I divine
my rio magico taking me
through canyons and canopies,
underground and above —
the metaphysic of transport,
the cantus of mythologies,
border less, carried by wind
and butterflies,
mariposas monarcas,
of Canada, America,
El Rosario sanctuary
where the Sanctus flames
in the blinding blue sky.

2.
But the rivers here
are dry as the stones
that cover the bones
of the desiccated poor —

their souls drifting
like gold dust
catching only
where laughter lands;

the newborn dead
blasted into heaven —
little sonic booms
of innocent release.

3.
My parent’s Jesus was blond
and suffered only rosary
rubies of blood;
barely broke a sweat,
blue eyes clearly beyond.

Here Jesus blossoms
in cool gilt chambers
reprieving toil;
limbs broken,
eyes rolled to ecstasy,
triumphing torture
and this exhausted soil.

4.
I miss the winter
lull of wet wind,
bare limbs
wild in the impetuous
warm respite;
night clouds cresting
an errant southern stream,
colossal sugar maple
writhing like sentries possessed,
casting, recalling love,
a crescent craft homing
the waves of midnight.

###

Biography: Ken Massicotte normally lives on Vancouver Island where he teaches English as a Second Language at the University of Victoria. He is currently residing in the UK. He has published in several online journals, including: River Poets Journal; Turk’s Head Review; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Retort Magazine; and Wilderness House Literary Review.

ARTIFACTS OF WOMANHOOD by Lana Bella

by

Deliberation by Mario Sanchez Nevado
Deliberation by Mario Sanchez Nevado

ARTIFACTS OF WOMANHOOD

by Lana Bella

this body of sun and moon,
a river of down-flow and shifting roots,
this was my life where
swimming beneath the pelt of obsession
to taste the blistered, salted past
was pressed into pockets of history,

to be one of the enlightened
I must first retain the skin-traveled winters,
rise from hard clay summers
with the things of greased feathers
scaled on my back,
I thought of that early parable when time dressed
in kindness
and mind grew fat
in the artifacts of womanhood–

here I lay translating
a blue-skinned future to a mercurial present,
and all the time I only hoped to empty
myself from within,
like a disease or grief,
like a lousy weather over a downtrodden city,

everything bent
to mimic the cellophane sweep
of the universe,
with their long spines telescoping
toward a single track wearing grooves over earth,
I stood once again, alone,
knowing in cross-ventilation of the now and then
that vertiginously lingered and rescinded
the reportage of my history
over and over,
at the same time–

###

A Pushcart nominee, Lana has a diverse work of poetry and fiction published and forthcoming with over 140 journals, including a chapbook with Crisis Chronicles Press (spring 2016), Ann Arbor Review, Chiron Review, Coe Review, Harbinger Asylum, Literary Orphans, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Quarterly, QLRS (Singapore), Taj Mahal Review (India), Sein Und Werden (UK), White Rabbit (Chile) and elsewhere, among others.

Lana resides in the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a wife of a talking-wonder novelist, and a mom of two far-too-clever frolicsome imps.