Tag: Survival

The Worst Scene

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jessica Barksdale

One minute, I was minding my own grief
and rearranging the pantry, and the next

I was in the duct with Captain Dallas from Alien,
both of us searching for what might kill us.

The captain wanted to destroy the alien, and I wanted
to find a male companion with whom to travel

into old age. Both Dallas and I were passengers on an aging
spaceship with an obvious destination. But now, such

difficult tasks, the spaceship rumbling into disaster,
with urgency, a monster headed our way. It’s moving

right toward you, the crewmates yelled, and there
was no denying the darkness with gnashing teeth

looming closer. Dallas urged me forward, though
we could feel the cold metal sweat of the beast

behind us. Get out of there, the crewmates screamed,
but really, no matter what, there was only one exit

and behind us, nothing but jaws and acid and
certain destruction. Hang on, Dallas whispered,

even as the creature grabbed us both, even
as the journey ended the way it was supposed to.

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Riddle

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Banks

It was everything I didn’t have
and all I wanted. 

If I could have it
I knew I would have all
I didn’t have and everything
I wanted. 

It was a key to the city
of dreams, a hacker’s code
in a hackneyed spy film,
a sleek black rectangle
of plastic with no limit I could slip
into my back pocket. 

I wasn’t wrong. I found it.
Doors did open
and chairs were gestured free.
I saw carpets roll out in strangers’ eyes. 

They flock like moths to artificial light.
It tickles me, how they brush their tattered wings
on my glass skin, fiends for the bright,
willing even to die— 

I can make anyone
tell me everything
I want to hear
for a night. 

They hate me when they learn I’m not the sky.  

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Another Refugee Poem

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pichchenda Bao

This poem has already been written.
The nausea, familiar.
You’ve been left, bobbing
bereft, in water, watching
flames eat home and hearth.
Or vicariously felt
that dread suck of time
elongating the slim barrel of a gun.
You’ve picked your steps
through a landscape of corpses,
fumbled through each level of grief.
This poem, your companion.

But who will read this poem?
Not the ones with the guns.
Nor the ones cheering them on
or silently assenting
to their menace.
Not even the ones who are carrying
their children away from their fears
toward your fears
of what you know
about this country.
This poem does not
traffic in saviors.

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I Should Know a Millionaire

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erik Wilbur

Featured Art: Family by Harry Grimm, Nancy Dick, and Carolyn Williams 

two-jobs-having-scrubbers-of-piss-stains-from-pitted-grout-in-fast-food-bathrooms.

I’ve met my fair share of honest hunched-over-the-dish-pit-scraping-
nibbled-on-fork-fucked-duck-confit-into-trash-bins-SOBs.

You’ve hauled that trash to the alley tons of times. I’ve seen beads of sweat
on many American faces. I’ve seen a bead of sweat catch the right light        

on a man’s brow and then fall into a scrap-metal bin like a lost diamond.
Each of us should have how-we-made-it stories, instead of stories about waiting          

all day in a line that runs down a city sidewalk for nothing. Man, I’m tired
of only knowing broke-ass-just-tryin-to-get-by-motherfuckers,         

tired of seeing skinny dudes my age at intersections twirling cardboard arrows
or watching mothers put items back on grocery shelves after silently adding up     

the contents of their shopping carts. America, by now I thought
I’d know one millionaire, at least, ‘cause I’ve seen enough bootstrap-pulling     

to pull whole ghettos out of crab grass and chain link, enough to pull the bars off
every window and every kid off stray-bullet-stray-chihuahua-streets—

if no one were pushing down on them, I mean.

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I propose we worship the mud dauber

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Pierce

Featured Art: by Pieter Holsteyn

The female in particular seems worthy.
She carries mud in her jaws to make her nest
one mouthful at a time, setting up
in a crevice or a corner. One egg,
one chamber. One egg, one chamber.
It’s better to keep them apart, as larvae don’t
know the difference between food and
a brother or a sister. They aren’t wicked,
just young and hungry. She has pirate
wasps to battle—they want her young
to feed their own offspring—and she does this
alone, drinking flower nectar to keep
herself going. Let’s just try

and see what happens when we raise up
this winged thing who will hover by your feet
without attacking. Covered with dense golden
hair and sometimes described as singing while
she works, all she wants is bits of damp dirt.
She has a slender thorax and two thin
sets of wings to carry her and
her earth. She is exactly strong enough
for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn
or proclaim or fill your head with visions
as she hunts crab spiders and orb
weavers and black widows. Yes, let’s ask

her to pray for us as she stings
a black widow, brings it to its knees,
and sets off to feed her children,
singing as she holds up the world.

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Learning

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art from rawpixel.com

A new cure is invented every day,
along with a new disease
because every miracle needs a disaster
to survive, and there is no shortage
of disaster, the sparrows have learned
to eat anything under the slash-and-burn
of the sun, and the children have learned
how to weave plastic buttercups into bracelets
between the alphabet and spoonfuls of NyQuil
their mothers give them before bed
where they dream of the swish of scar tissue
behind their teacher’s glass eye.

We tell them: There is horror. There is pain.
There are people wedged between bullets
and mud floors, between cracked river ice
and broken elevator shafts. But not here.
Never here.

Now, we sit still as an Eames chair, and the children
will never know the bridge of a song the rain spells
out in the sand on an October morning.
It is safer behind closed doors and windows, safer
where the wheat and ragweed and daisies
can kill no one.

We tell them: We have seen the grim amoeba of lake water,
the blizzard of ocean waves lashing against the curved spine
of coast, the blue-eyed grass raising itself like a rash toward
the swollen ache of sun, the sting of salt, grazing the long arm
of a bluff. We have lived it. We know better now.
We have knelt at the rim of a cliff and looked down.
We have fallen, felt the pulse of the sea pull at our hair
and it was not kind.

Child, put your ear to the conch shell and listen.
This is enough.

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Lap Dance with No Ending

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathleen Balma

There’s a bouncer in this poem, watching
you read it. His name is Vic. Vic won’t make
eye contact, won’t bug you unless I signal
distress. I’ve never had to do that in poetry
yet. He was in the army. Discreet as a landmine.
As long as you keep still and do nothing
while I work, he won’t interrupt this lit
experience. Vic may or may not have killed.
He may or may not use meth. He does work out.
He does know my routine. He’s seen me do it
dozens of nights. He knows all the words
to the money songs. His peripheral vision
is muscular. It sees every crook and swerve
of me, though he and I don’t speak and I
have never touched him. It’s crucial that you
fear him while my naked’s in your face.
Only sometimes you need more. The dog
tags looped through my shoe strap, those
aren’t Vic’s. I can defuse a bomb with my teeth.

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The Dock Hand

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kathryn Merwin

this is a poem about losing things.

not a poem

for the boys who barreled their broken

bodies into the lightningwalls

of my body. for the knife

of let me       

in, baby, the trigger-finger

of let’s

go back to my place, just one drink.    

you, draining the blue

from my veins, dyeing

empty sheets of skin,

blue again, purple,

blue. the color

of healing of bloodpool

       beneath skin.  for the crushed

       powder in my jack & coke of

no one will ever believe you.

you’ll spend the summer in alaska

and we’ll both pretend

like we’re not losing

something.

you have no idea

       what i’m gonna do       to you.

yes,            I do.

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Without Pain

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin”
—marketing slogan from Purdue Pharma

All day the rain spills onto the backyard deck.
The narcoleptic hours, darkened and dim, rewind and nod off.

My mother walks five miles to the emergency room on a Sunday.
She complains of a toothache, tells the doctors she needs something

to get by. It is predicted the temperature will rise 30 degrees in the next
twelve hours, then drop 20 more tomorrow, which means more talk

of global warming or the next ice age, more waiting for the Earth’s
fever to break like a sick child.

On television, people are dancing in a field of wildflowers.
The sun hits their faces, their pupils confetti.

A man appears in a lab jacket, claims he has found the cure for all pain.
He crushes the flowers, alkaloids running white across his chin.

You too can be like them, he says. And maybe we can.
But then, without pain—

What will the monks chant? What shrouded
music, what raspy voice will rise from the A.M.

radio, move like heat lightning against our spines?
Who will hear our minareted cries, our tangled

whispering, lowered breath pleading with
the moon? What hand will rock us

to sleep, float through our hair
like bath water, bring us to our knees,

lift our awkward heads
toward the frayed dawn?

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