Category: Uncategorized

Here’s to the freshman in the kelly green pantsuit
channeling her inner Hillary as
she struts down the hallway
schedule in hand, in search of a
cinderblock classroom;

Blessed is the sophomore
who came in from the rain in
mirrored sunglasses and
Jim Morrison vintage polyester shirt
strolling past the
laughing “Fuck yeah” boys—
junior football players who
stumble unapologetically into
English classes
massacring the vernacular in
grins and grimaces,
slapping backs and saluting teachers.

Praise be to the senior sporting
a glittering tiara and black combat boots
with no trace of irony,
her eyes thick and heavy with
kohl black eyeliner (she’s under there somewhere),
and the brave boy boasting a
hopeful Harvard sweatshirt on the
first day of a new school year.

Let’s hear it for the girl in the cropped
I vampires tee, next to
the gaggle of girls in summer sundresses and Converse,
carefully orchestrating pretty and
nonchalant like a curated bouquet of
wildflowers.

I salute the stragglers who can’t zip up
their hoodies high enough to hide behind,
the ashen-faced fashion acolytes wearing
too much highlighter over too plucked brows,
the confused wanderers who show up to
second semester’s period seven class
six months early.

They come in all shapes and sizes and colors
with names as unusual as Astoria,
common as John,
complicated as
“Curtis Allen Conway-Carpenter III
but you can call me ‘Alex.’”

Sports socks and gym bags and backpacks
AirPods and laptops and composition notebooks
lipsticks and coffee cups and stainless-steel water jugs;
Some spilling out of bustiers and others clad in
Pokémon pajama pants.

There is a place for all here in
this temple of my familiar,
This stream of dreams and drudgery,
180 days a year

Grandma grew daylilies
along the east side
of the Jordan Drive house,
and every day in June they
bloomed like little orange
firework bursts,
their faces uplifted to the sun,
a single day of life,
brilliant, bright, vibrant,
a marmalade retinue of glorious buds
peeled back like tangerine rind,
fluttering in the early summer breeze,
hapless but happy.
They were the backdrop of my
halcyon days:
tossing that speckled ball
fished from a wire cage
at the Ben Franklin,
sloshing in the little inflatable pool,
dodging that long, green snake of a hose,
plucking and munching garden tomatoes,
corralling crickets
into mayonnaise jars,
riding on Grandpa’s lap
aboard the lawnmower,
cutting across that emerald acre,
resplendent,
unburdened,
sated.
And so, I have transplanted
their ocher progeny
in the eastern corner of my home,
their faces upturned to the same sun,
too-brief lives splendid
and pure,
and each June morning
when I gaze upon their enclave
at the foot of the screened porch,
they whisper to me,
not in words
but echoes
of continuity,
souvenirs
of the continuum,
remembrances
of the infinity
of my daylily childhood

You, water,
object of my praise.
Oh, wondrous clouds,
plush beyond measure.
I want to admire you for
hours with my gaze.
Oh, crystalline taste-inexorable pleasure.
Lustrous beads that form an
endless expanse
oceans alive
with undulating motions.

Oceans of endless
depth, infinitely clear
particles shield light from
the dark depths all humans know.
Lustrous beads that bond together,
a mirage which wavers,
a hallucination
leading us off
the cliff of sorrow.

Lustrous beads create
impenetrable fog.
I’m senseless, unaware
of what lies
right in front of me,
blind to the truth
right under my nose.
The revelation remains restrained,
reticent due to nagging thoughts.

Lustrous beads pour
down
down
down-
a torrent that
floods, drowns,
and embraces me.
A mirror into my soul.
A gateway
to my assurances.
An introspection
to my insecurities.

You could drown me,
boil me,
freeze me,
and I need that.
You don’t scare me.
You relieve me.

I need you
to quench my thirst
down my throat-
but how,
how can I ask for you?
We scrutinize
your impurities,
traces of viruses
and algae.

But the pure water,
the clean water,
portrays our
best selves,
reflections not clouded
by impurities.

Why is it so hard
to find water
in our dry society,
though it’s in all of us?

Endless abundance,
yet so sparse,
an unnoticed sight:
the wonders of water.

In my bag I carry
Annotated Four Quartets,
Do not write or read a single thing

Nor think of you when my
Legs rush in-between cars
Water gets inside of my shoes and
In the brim of my long skirt

This is not a walkable city after all;
I used to think,
Trauma defined me

But sitting at this swing-bench
Looking at the sun-bathed deck
People playing on the water
Laughing, splashing at each other
I am no longer linked to you

Trauma may not efface
Just like grief
But I will grow
Around it

An olive tree
Spreading its roots
Around the stones
Making their way
Into the warm soil;
Whatever we call home
Will reach me

Stripped to the waist
you wield your mighty hammer,
turning molten metal
into works of art.

How sad it is
others could not see beyond
your unsightly visage,
your poor crippled legs.

Even your wife,
bound to you against her will,
despised you, betrayed you,
plotted against you.

Yet Gods used you –
to make their thrones, their armour,
their crowns and thunderbolts,
your skills knew no bounds.

I would have liked
to have met you, Hephaestus,
watch you wield that hammer,
thrust those tongs in fire.

God of the Forge,
gone but never forgotten,
I hope it helps to know
your legend lives on.

Lumi, I write to you
With squinting eyes
Under the pale reflection of the moon
And the torturing cold of the north
I write in blue
Shaky? — yes but my hand complies
Although my thoughts lie strewn
I’ll still pen them forth.

Lumi, I write to you
From many nights in that tiny room
The gathered garner of our amity
When you were nothing but illumination
And I wrote and read and drew,
On the floor were always scattered pieces of a student’s workloom
But you were a lifeless embody of directing luminosity
Your forty eyes in this room were Haven.

Lumi, I write to you
With two fingers married to your switch
Cursing NEPA in between gritted teeth,
I also rue the days I let you fall
And I know an ode to you is overdue
Your glass and tiny bulbs, O’ such luminous distich
I never thought of the day I would sit in the dark and seethe
Knowing a flick of your switch wouldn’t turn you on, at all.

i love you.
your orange hues amaze me.
Please. Don’t die.

i adore you.
God blessed you with speckles
of white in the rim of your wings.
Please. Don’t go.

Even though I laid eyes on you
for a mere second,
I was hypnotized by your beauty.
All butterflies are unique —
but you, darling, stand out amongst them all.

There will never be another like you.

Which is why
I would even beg to God,
who decides to give and take away,
to keep you for a little longer.
The ones who haven’t been born
need to see how beautiful you are.

So please…
I love you.
I adore you.
Please. Don’t die.

Please. Don’t go.

— Leslie Rwigyema

Oh Attic love,
painted shadow,
born by adder and asphodel meadows
To the ghettos of the damned.
On a white, fated train,
you slipped away slowly
in veil and lace
– one eye on the tracks ahead
You danced the night before
and I swore to follow.

The path winds further within the maw,
diamonds pulsing on iron walls
are entrenched and numbered stars
that fade.
I wander forward,
bound by gnashing and gnawing,
swallowed by the crash of boots,
the weight of screams,
drawing toward I spiral
down
forward,
down and forward,
down

until stripped of thought
and thin of song
but still

one note lingers.

The grave king,
stoic knave of a forgotten choir
awaits on throne of smoke and ash.
Yet I must pluck these barbed strings,
tinny wires, and sing
but dead echoes cry:
liar, liar
in these halls of fear and fire.

One, still of some reality,
sees beauty, oh the pomegranate tomb that is Persephone,
where love once bloomed.
She finds truth among the unsung notes.

The song, a sacred plea.
To stir the heart of Persephone.
And when her cold assent has set you free
I lead you back, Eurydice

Now ambrosian beauty, trails behind
As brass bullets sweat from the bulwark walls,
follow me through broken glass
dreams, past the banks of Lethe, from the
bony grasp of the Cypress tree, we will
dance and flee
me from you,
you, my Eurydice.

Out through torrid gates of death,
open now as the waking eyes of Cerberus
yawn below. Love taken once, twice,
now, saved from vitriolic fate.
All my love can not turn back to see
the beauty, fair, of Eurydice.

Oh, sweet resistance undone!
Look,
look upon the love that tears my soul,
breaking from the borders of the abyss.
Behold, the one I’ve missed,
departing still from vile snaking corridors.
But as I turn, she fades
forever departing from me.
Oh

impassioned woe besieges me
yet senses fashion less beauty
when assaulted by ashen passing
and all my words wilt.
With all my heart I plead to be
a second more, Eurydice.

I am a ghost,
now born more
in that furnace where
bodies of dust
rain like sand in time.
This is the world
where Helicon is hell
and my verse
lines up one by one
and falls to gunfire,
where lives are interned
in the urns of inferno,
Where I,
seek to free myself
now,
from Eurydice

Below lies the Eulogy of a Caterpillar:

If death be every human’s right, then be diligent
In your attempt to die making a difference. Be steadfast
In your right to kick and fight out of
That cocoon that holds you so. Inevitably,
We must all make the choice to suffocate
In silence or soar. To breathe the airs of freedom
We have never been. To soar the winds
Of the butterfly we all aspire to be…

My apologies- that is not the end of this ode.

You see, freedom for one is not
Transformation for all. And still
That melody of Sweet King Martin rings
True: Either we all win, or none of us do.
To see the emergence of one who was
Just like you is true transfiguration.

This truth approached me when I witnessed
The power of a picture. I saw a butterfly
Wading next to a cocoon anticipating the next
Awakening; to witness another breathe.
To perceive the death of a caterpillar.
Beholding the thriller of becoming a butterfly.

Therefore, to the caterpillars I say, “Words from hurting
Humans don’t have the authority to cocoon your purpose
So long as you allow wounds to turn into wings.”
And to every butterfly, I cry out: “Fight
To fly, but never do so alone.
Build a world that’s home for butterflies to roam
With the freedom from jealousy of another’s color.”
These were my final words as I bid my shell goodbye.

From yours truly, a baby butterfly.

The beauty that you hold is effortless.
Like wind cushioning a falling snowflake,
or perhaps like a piece of cake.
Marie Antoinette would have said
“Let the starving folk feast upon the spread!”
The helpings that we take are generous.

In your eyes, a mystery is swimming
through dense fog and storm-cloud gray castle walls.
In between the beating heart calls
a hunger, having been repressed.
Invite the piercing teeth upon my flesh
‘til the unknown emptiness is brimming.

Catch soft lips on jagged edges, the sweet
song of your name ringing from anxious breath
arriving at a little death.
A force of life, a gentle smile
soothing calloused memories, all the while
dripping silver and gold from crown to feet.

Crimson blooming in the veins, and flooding
capillaries with stardust, enamored
are those with a pulse that hammers
on their sleeve. Wearing love the way
mothers dawn pearls and perfume, a bouquet
of blush and coveted future budding.