July 25-31, 2016: Poetry from Nate Maye and Melissa Watt

Moonlit

along this path
with no lights
we live in an ancient time

when the power
goes out
we are reminded
of the real odor our
humanity carries

the real sounds
of scraping
all around us.

Constant

she says she is
constant
even wears it as a name

but she’s inconsistent
a sentence started
but never finished

a sound began
then falling off, a cascading
person, sliding away.

Insomniac

Count down from a hundred
to escape the waking
dread but it happens again.
Over five of them this time

crouch near the nightlight:
Centenarian ghosts in your home.
Downstairs, you find one
hunkered in the pantry with the Ritz.

Stare down his manacle-eyes’
dribble and glitter. Then sit
quietly in the den as one
by one, they come together

to take apart your coffee table.
Don’t ask why. Finally
Paul’s old harmonica shines
in moonlight. Close your eyes—

let the tremolo of old
sweep you clean, drift
over sleeping lapwings
until the world shakes alive.

Sponge Poem

Boil sponges in a pot but weigh them down or they will rise
like Jesus or absorbent swiss cheesed rebels.
You want them to stay below the surface for a purpose:

so that when you dish soap your pink plates, your glorified
macaroon holders, your delicate daisy glasses, when you scrub
mugs hard in the morning because a friend sent a picture text

of her freshly ornamented finger with the question,
“guess what?!” and you’re lost for words that aren’t jaded
or homicidal, when you just need to do something with your hands —

you want your tools to be unsullied, not architecture for bacteria,
perpetuators of chaos. You want peace when you stand
at the sink with a mindful drizzle of Dawn after working a double

at the Applebee’s or when you’ve just walked home from your lover’s
at 2am because you’re hoarse from forcing disparate lives to overlap
or sync, so the least you can do is have immaculate sponges.

Dreamwake

My dream lives in a soft spot of my skull- faded, creeping.
It is Jesus in your grilled cheese: the holy ordinary, mysterious

as our hunk of sun, gilded but binding us to the earth.
Sometimes I feel the burning borders of my heart give way

as we enact the obligatory predation of the workweek.
The dreaming sleeps. We: a gallery of mimics behind

our tablets on the verge of forgetting love as a way of life.
Our bodies were not put here to ignore the ability to embrace,

to droan, hangdog, under fluorescents, up and down the same
hallway for a bathroom break- a minute to breathe.

What brio is left,after thirteen years spent underused in offices, derogated
through coffee making? In the evening, suddenly, I, too, own a burning

pair of wings. A noise bleeds through my breathing- the treble of violets.
Here is our inheritance of light: God’s leonine burnishing.