SUPERNOVA: Selected poems from our call for submissions

Don’t ask me why,
but I find it pleasing to know that our bodies
are made up of heavy, complex molecules
not originally of this world.
	
I have recently learned, my darling, that
these complex molecules where not a feature
of the big bang.
That mysterious phenomenon made only light molecules
helium, hydrogen, all those things over to the left
on the periodic table.
	
To produce heavy molecules it is necessary to have heat,
enormous heat, far hotter than the surface of the sun.
We defy imagination!
	
After much bewilderment
astrophysicists determined that the only source of this much heat
in the known Universe occurs 
when a supernova explodes ferociously 
as it collapses into a black hole.
	
That’s you and me baby.
Full of atoms 
from one of the most mysterious forces in the Universe.
	
The more I understand
the more I look in awe and wonder
at what His hand hath wrought.
and often time I find myself humming along 
to the song inside my head
How great Thou art. How great Thou art.
	

I like your eyes
your spherical skies
your luminous, numinous, blueminous eyes
		
I like your nose
how wayward it goes
how lenten weather renders it rose
		
I like your hair
that nest up there
deceptively golden, a bedtime prayer
		
I like your chin
sparse stubble, so thin
silly result of original sin
		
I like your hands
when they make demands
point with two fingers, I’ll follow your plans
		
you like her lips
I hate my hips
opening to face your apocalypse
		
your eschaton
when I am gone
bury me in your mouth after a warm yawn

       Roughly one third of American adults 
       have made a return visit to their childhood home
       —Psychology Today
	
	
I’m trying not to be seen pocketing horse chestnuts 
from the yard (not stealing, not exactly) before going softly 
on my way. New ownership has wildly 
taken root—fire pit, tree swing, dogs mid-leap, bicycles 
ready on car’s roof—in my day I could never engineer 
how to bust out from beige and airtight dining room 
(floors hardly scuffed in forty years) to a more 
exuberant being, but now I see how near 
You were to me, preparing, always waiting 
in the hall where I became my longing 
to be Your handiwork—stepping forward, 
drawing back, letting feasts fall
from the table. Within those walls 
this hunger, given. 
	

Here we stand, mildly coerced 
by the hired consultant:
Form a circle, please—as in, 
			
let’s ace these games 
and keep our jobs. Shoulder 
to shoulder. Just 
			
per-r-r-fect. A stifled snicker,
my crooked shrug. Big exhale: 
a-h-h-h . . . Who will volunteer 
			
she means, her smile so well-meaning, 
to enter the center first, muster the last 
micron of blindfolded nerve, 
			
then keel over backwards? I’m busy, 
assessing the office weather: George, 
our rookie who quakes when braving
			
the whiz-bang copy machine;
Joon, paper jam wrangler, eying Ray, 
espresso-run czar. Plus me, and my tears 
			
muddling barista froth in concentric hearts 
that day the program crashed 
for the ninth time, when we all stepped up, 
			
leaned into something unseen 
ghosting among us. Now, before 
we hear Step right up, 
			
there’s still time to recall 
a ring of disciples, and Peter, 
facing the basin and towel, his naked wish 
			
to belong, with all his mates 
seeing his need. Fierce as mine? Oh, 
how unforced, even comic, the going down.
			

The rubble of lives in distant places,
assailed by bombs, fires, ill-will,
and right in this neighborhood

people crumpled on sidewalks,
collapsed on bus stop benches
or stained cardboard beds.  

When daylight sinks like a lead
diving helmet, when the last
birds offer their songs 

to the deadened air, when night
finally bestows a wary
sleep, stars deploy 

their long silver ropes,
drop them down to earth,
so this massive realm—

trees, oceans, skyscrapers, 
mountains—dangles on filaments 
of light—the groaning world 

lifted, carried, swung—
a pendulum of distant fire,
a shining fueled by each 

small act of kindness, the seed
within the too-ripe fruit, the grace
in each torn seam.

Family night, and we ask the children
	to help plant flowers around the house.  
	
	While blue sky yields to pink and gold—
shadows chasing Ohio evening to sunset—

we spread moist, pungent mulch on the beds,
	dirty our hands and fingernails in black earth,

	trace a dark sentence on the face scratching 
a cheek or swiping a bee from the forehead.

First hole dug, my wife asks our four-year-old
	for a potted peony, and tapping her trowel
 
	on the casing to drop it from the balled roots, 
 says finally, Now . . . let’s place her in the hole.

Why, our daughter asks, Why did you call
 	the flower a “her”? And her mother replies, 

	Because flowers are girls. In less than a blink 
of thought, our daughter understands, nods

to inescapable logic, And weeds . . . weeds are boys.  
	That’s right, says her mother, since the dawn of time.  

	“Really?” I say. “Weeds are boys? That’s reductive.”  
It’s her age, you insist, channeling more mystical 
	
than postmodern for now. Besides, it’s gospel.
	Last time I read, Adam introduced the thorns, not Eve.

	None will find this notion in any translation, but few
riddles of the old books have persevered as long.

The best that I could do is in the ditch.
The life I worked so long to build clatters
by on a barrow.  I cannot say it matters
just where I left the road for the trees, or which
it was.  I count an hour in breaths, and grope
a string that runs through smoke to God knows what.
My steady nausea turns a week, which starts
to feel like a distance that I’ve run.  Like hope.
A feather-whisper seeing those years (years!)
extinct calls this the gentlest way God could
have shown how far I was, and tugged me near.
Be little.  Shelter.  Sweating in the wood,
I pile up stones to praise the Father-storm
that struck my eyes with a truer, hurter warm.

Florida’s heart and soul isn’t Disney.
It’s cattle and row on row of squash 
berries and beans. I am no farmer,
but there is a growing love I have found 
for a field I noticed as I was driving
inland on the highway past Plant City.
Morning light the color of a ripening 
kumquat, confused in a rising ground fog, 
lit the field and its green fencerows, breaking
my expectations of the ordinary unspooling
beyond my windshield. Rows and furrows appeared. 
Then the beds were made up with their long sheets.
I never would see anyone working there,
but each week as I passed by, I found more
work was done. Red, full, but invisible
today from the road, I knew the strawberries
were in. Twenty pickers, each back hard bent
with shirts a dozen colors, as paint dabbed
to dot that ripened slope of farmland
stooped to their aching work as I sped past.
Even now, the glimpse of them attending
thankless to the sweetness for other mouths
helps me, humbling my words into dust.

After three months of blossoms
the seven-stalked hollyhocks
growing rogue in the sidewalk
outside the corner church
under the unblinking gazes
of Saint Francis and his dove —
finally they will die, I thought.
Surely summer rot is ready 
for its turn onstage. Once more,
beauty has done its worst
to our cold reserves of death.
Bluebells and buttercups,
what more could color find
to say in our depths?
Well, the forsythia gashes
and the morning squeals
yellow-yellow-yellow bloom.
Won’t you leave the stony 
face of my heart alone? 
No, the hollyhocks seem 
to say today in a new undone 
dozen white and fuchsia flags 
taut and flown with such verve
they make that granite bird
sing out as I walk by.

Big brother memories
have been shooting through me
one unselfishness at a time
like meteors released
into my soft space
since you told me
you have been catapulted
into the territory of diagnosis

you look at me with those big 
brown eyes that have been
my fixed moons 
and I cannot stop wanting
to cry out and get you out
of this muddled milky sway
of black holes and exploding stars
where all your generosities 
don’t seem to carry any weight at all
in the family of the scheme of things

I am fist-fighting 
those negative thinkers
this morning, waiting
to hear results of my brother’s tests

trying not to squeeze into 
the chair he will be sitting in
when life and death will be
charted out for him 

with the dainty uncertainties 
of timelines and detours

I would much rather be making
a call to the trumpet blower

I would like to become wile e coyote 
enough to convince him to blow 
the blasting thing loud right now 
so that we can all just stop
chasing each other
looking for new leases on life

instead, let us show up now 
in front of that lovely gate
stand together transformed
ready to announce that 
the poor in spirit have arrived
ahead of time