Thisbe and Olivia on Orchard Street [1]

This is the start of a very long poem.

I. Thisbe in Mrs. Faber’s First Grade Class

The felt bleeds, I know I can see it. Inky fingerprints. It must hurt the markers! For me to color, they give what Crayola gave them.

But the factory made each marker for a purpose. So one must feel good when I use it, the friction drawing out juice. And it must like my picture—

the wetting and digging and pulling of paper fibers, ink mixing with ink to make the red-orange of Kelly Ridd’s hair.

While sitting in my desk, does a marker ache for use? I should use them all the time! But they expire! And to expire is to die—so they must be in pain. So it is one or the other.

I wish I could just ask them.

I bet I could color my hair the color of Kelly Ridd’s hair.

My desk smells like wet saltines. I could to better at keeping it clean.

I. Olive on the Way Home from the Coffee Shop

I got robbed!

The kind where the asshole confused me behind the till. Twenty for a dollar, three tens for a twenty and a five and five dollars, five for five and ten dollars, no could I have three tens if I give you ten and five dollars. Then it’s a bouquet of paper that smells like salt and later my drawer is twenty short.

The shop is slowly folding. Now I am twenty short. I was already short.

This morning I got two shots in two arms. That was dumb. Idiotic symmetry. Two sets of clumpy muscles. And I lost the quarter inch I grew last summer.

I’ll still tell people I’m five five.

I don’t mean to sound defeated. But now my driver’s license is mostly a lie and I just lost twenty dollars.

Kelin Loe

Untitled

checked out like a bad criminal left

fingerprints all over your heart.

wasted nights in the mountains,

bloody shadows, whiskey tongue

and watching the sunrise as history

fell apart over a thousand years.

there is no one left to talk to but the sun

rises everywhere, the world is bigger than us

and we only have two hands to wind

the broken clocks and watch.

 

from the dust on your heels to the tequila

bottles of piss, to the strange face

shaking in the mirror

stubbled memories into the sink

from a rusted razor.

because love is an effort to change war

into something human.

because a hundred smiles can't fit

into one of your winks.

because the belly of the moon

has a haggard stomach.

 

the caves north of Madrid harbor this

that I have left of the sunset we saw

from that bridge when

our lives played the black keys

on a dancing Saturday night

with a Spanish tongue.

-Aaron Blum 

Finally, Today I Felt Happy

There is a stone water tower
in southern Minneapolis
with knights stationed all around.
We climbed the hill and stood
beneath gargantuan swords.
An old, blackened oak there
thinks it is Halloween, so we
picked its acorns and tossed them
like eggs.

A breeze came through my hands
that felt like running water.
I closed my eyes and felt the grass
breathing beneath my feet.
When I run, I turn into a deer
and bound endlessly between the rocks.

- Dan Olmschenk