Category: poetry mojo21

By Meagan Chandler

They called Pandora’s curiosity
her curse. Her need to find the source
of the death bells and desperate clawing,

a weakness. When smoke black as crow song
danced through the cracked lid, they told us
breathe in truth and your lungs will burn.

They didn’t want us scouring village wells
for bloated bodies of women. Uprooting lilies
to find bone just as white beneath. The truth

about Pandora is that her veins were threaded
with urge to open doors boarded
by scraps of weathered cathedrals.

The truth:
Women like us have nightmares
with our eyes open.

By Mackenzie Kae

Psalm For The Future
By Mackenzie Kae

sometimes i dream about
smashing computers with
lacquered wooden bats.
the feel of the wood between
my hands as i swing
down with all my rage.

as i smite thee!
smite! smite! smite!

i dream a lot about
telling the truth, always have.
sometimes i seize a sliver
of a second to stop lying.

never ends well so i
start laughing.
oh god, you thought-
thought i was serious?

i dream about having any
goddamn thing to say at all.
you know, things that matter?
things that keep your
parents and partners eyes
from glazing over like 4am
at bakeries and at brothels.

you gotta bleed for that
but i only bleed into the sheets,
only bleed to blocked numbers.

this is my sob story,
this is my ameri-tragedy.
you can take it when you
kill me or cut me a check.
show me the money!

sell out!
don’t be stupid, stupid,
it’s either sell out
or pass down the
generational poverty.

i never lost me so
i could never find me.
no, i did find me –
i was high watching selma,
i was high watching trailer park boys,
i was high watching cartoons
in beige-walled rooms.

someone wanted to touch me
so i bit off their hand
and shook it like a dog.

let me holler like a hit dog –
i mean, let me sing the truth,
the truth:

you are the only reason
i wake up in the morning.
you are the only reason,
i want to find myself again.

if my eyes ever glaze over,
i hope you pull my heart
out my chest.
i hope you can see it
for what it really is –
a lacquered wooden bat.

i hope you smash
the goddamn world to bits
and the fires smell like home.

By GTimothy Gordon

There are the stars pinned to
heavenly bone-black night

hovering above, faint light
below beneath our feet,

bottom of rock-solid earth
caught mostly in shadow,

umber, ochre, tint of graphite grey.

By E.G.N Lafleur

“Every book by an English historian is dedicated “To Gladwyn Turbutt- who took me to Crécy” and what that is referencing is a torrid homosexual affair that took place between the two ugliest men imaginable”

• @WB_Baskerville, 04 Jun 21, X.com

For Gladwyn Turbutt, who took me to Crécy

It was his moustache that got me, his moustache and the
Wellington boots, which he invariably wore
to view battlefields. We stayed at Le Lion D’Or and ate at the
Signe du Lapin, Côtes du Rhône between us.
I couldn’t understand why he wanted me
to come with him. He wouldn’t say he loved me
but he said, we’ll walk out tomorrow. It’s dark now.
And it was, November, not yet Advent.

All night I lay in the silence, no streetlamps,
waiting for him to roll across the bed.
We did walk out, under an Austerlitz
sky, revelatory.
I skidded on the edge of a pikeman’s pit –
heavy soled Derbys for me –
feet divorced mud and air, and in the air
time, percussion, the
hiss of arrows and squelch
of flesh.
He caught me by the arm,
hard,
hauling me up by hairy tweed and
the plain was grass, inviolate, but he took me back to Le Lion and
took me.

That was ten years ago now, and
Gladwyn is dead, Poelcapelle,
body lost to the battlefield.
Think of his hand tight on my bicep,
three years my elder and better,
shell-hole, archer’s stance, Le Lapin and time and
air.

By Hana Damon Tollenaere

for the same reasons
a wine-stained mouth
smells like a family reunion,
the only kind of perfume
you’ll need to get a favor
from me, for old times’
sake, the kind that leaves
you cold with the window
open and hot in the face,
meanwhile the dragonfly
traps prey in its front legs,
while we sip our wine,
then immobilizes it by way
of shredding its wings,
and for a minute sometimes
I lose my trajectory,
but you appear motionless
in flight, like always,
then spread your lips:
a gut-stained smile.