the Monkey Review

Est. 2013 Poetry

[cherokeeghostwriter]

waiting in line

this is where a poem would be. if I had one.

this empty space looks back at me- an eternity observing at a distance, waiting.

i've settled into this three-dimensional space, living out my linear existence- my sentience cast as sculpture, waiting in line.

the silence has acquired a shape. dust rehearses the outline of things i almost meant.

somewhere, language is still becoming itself. birdsong discovers the morning without first consulting a dictionary. the tide arrives having forgotten every name ever given it.

perhaps poems are not written.

perhaps they are excavated- a careful brushing-away of everything that believed it was stone.

if so, i've mistaken the waiting for the work.

i've been polishing the pedestal instead of listening for the first fracture.

this is where a poem would be.

hidden beneath the outline of a man still standing aside, making room for its arrival.

[stolenhead]

cloistered into the matted snarl of nightfall on this sabbath of a year that held me like the mother spent me like a tithe where i dance like water along the rushes

[cherokeeghostwriter]

the time, it takes

in the long shadows of late afternoon we stopped to stare, standing in a space where once were raised the altars to our gods.

a puzzle of stone crumbling effigies strewn- slipped out of temples -now in fields unknown.

we spoke in lowered voices then, as if the air still kept some memory of our trespass some promise left unswept.

the wind moved through the broken forms like breath that could not stay, and something in us answered it, then slowly turned away.

no fire remains to gather round, no names we dare to call- just lengthening shadows stretching out and time, that takes it all.

[stolenhead]

you are weeping laughter inside the bloodless wound of someone else's sunday morning you sing incantations behind the chapel veil of each unbroken dawn

[brotherorpheus]

anti-poem

i don’t feel things about stuff

there is nothing wrong with me

i am content with where i am

and all my choices

like a flower or something

i am not in pain

i know nothing of trauma

i have not suffered

like that greek guy

my relationship with my parents is

healthy and functional

i do not have a deep-seated yearn

for gradual self-destruction in foolish

defiance of the fascist notion that

life must revolve around the pursuit

of currencies and vacation bundles

and subscription models and the

cowardly return to the lime-flavored

Skittle

i do not have an undiagnosed and

untreated attention disorder

i am not constantly on the verge

of collapse

i have not collapsed

i have not shattered

like something that would break

if it fell on the floor

like a plate or something

i am not lying in pieces

i am not lying

like i don’t know what

[cherokeeghostwriter]

love is a window in time- the briefest of forevers

like the kitchen window of my childhood home, when the evening sun fell sideways landing through the glass turning dust to fire.

i remember standing there- barefoot on cool linoleum, the backyard stretching out past the fig trees, and the cinder-block fence that held in nothing but our small idea of the world.

we were laughing at something- i don’t remember what -and that’s how it is. the words go first -while the light stays.

for a moment everything was suspended- the hum of cicadas, the slow drift of smoke from a neighbor’s burn pile, my father’s voice somewhere behind me singing to no one in particular.

and within that square of gold i believed- without effort, without question that this was it. this warmth that could not possibly end. this sky beyond the fence had chosen us for its forever.

but the light shifted, as it always does. the sun slipped lower. the room cooled- and the laughter quietly moved into memory.

love is not the years that follow. It is the way the air felt in that narrow band of evening- how your face held the sun, how my chest ached with something too large to name.

love is a window in time. -we do not live there.

we pass it, touch the glass, and carry the warmth long after the light has gone.

[cherokeeghostwriter]

backlit

there is a strange backlit quality to the world outside- like a vintage postcard left too long in a drawer, its winter softened in time.

evening light clings to the edge of things. an old house waits, windows glowing amber, holding out the promise that warmth still exists somewhere.

i overdescribe what i see, as if detail were devotion, as if naming each shadow might bridge the distance between us-

whoever you are.

i keep adding words, hoping one will lean far enough to touch.

but language falters.

there are no names left for what moves me. no metaphor wide enough to carry me out.

only supplication- quiet, unbeautiful, kneeling in the margins- and the unintended aftermath of wanting too much to be understood.

[syntaxandsemantics]

a thump then frenzied beating. there's nothing keeping this hammering heart from soaring but an invisible force, solid enough to bruise, bleeding internal - a mortal wound - we'll all die anyway, some staring at the sky / eyes open like a stolen kiss, a secret - can't be kept when the body sings confessions so loud it echoes; in another life I would be kneeling. if this were real, we'd speak the same language, I could wrap my mind around the feel of your tongue, the pressing of lips together, grasp the nuance of falling breath and silence the space creates an illusion of distance, I lose myself in perspective without trying - everything converges towards a vanishing point I'll never reach, the future disappearing before me. might be love on the horizon, enjoy a world tinted in gauzy warmth before it fades. time flickers on and it's just my reflection in the glass.

[serandori]

Light Machinery Humming in the Dark

People think the middle of the night belongs to poets. That we wake, touched by a breeze of ideas, and walk to the desk barefoot, pen hovering over paper like a divining rod.

I can tell you it doesn’t work that way. The hours between two and four are for the unfinished business of the body and the mind. They are for old debts, for vertebrae that complain in Morse code, for a sink that still smells faintly of onions.

Once, at a gallery opening, a man in a velvet jacket asked me what I dreamed of when the moon was high. He looked at me as though I ought to say a staircase spiraling out of the sea, or a woman standing in a doorway holding a golden lantern.

Instead I told him: the hum of the refrigerator is too loud in my apartment. He blinked, took a sip of his wine, and looked for someone with better material.

He didn’t know that the hum is my own heart in the quiet, counting off the years I meant to live differently. He didn’t know that every night, I see the half-packed suitcase on the top shelf of my closet and remember all the places I didn’t go.

People want the black forest and the shining maid. They want me to wrap pain in ribbon. But pain is not a gift. It’s a small animal that lives under the porch and won’t leave, no matter how politely you ask.

[wordrummager]

a world shaped like a dandelion puff but not so soft, with missteps and wishes that float away like dust we fall but don’t always bend and find inside we’re twisted aching for relief exactly where we should be, lost and watching clouds as if we find peace in the sky

[syntaxandsemantics]

a day of dragging chains, domestic and rusty against all that fresh growth, catching on feet like a plea refused, we must, i whisper (in my head - who talks to grazing as if it listened?). the rain's unseasonable but welcome, for some; today it kisses my cheek a softly apology, accepted with grace and a bit of heat while i'm thinking of leaving as a choice, not a place, or the changes of trees - what it means to fall, feel the consequences of gravity. those lines are bold and heavy, drawn in - consider me contained, frustrated at times when movements too slow, i howl at the sky, wait for an answer from over the wall, through the bars, hope for a chorus - one we can all sing along to - like a fugue, something to remind us of unity, of running, of ourselves deciding of home like a cadence, maybe (try) tomorrow.

[cherokeeghostwriter]

yesterday

I walked the woods out back gathering fallen limbs- windfall remains, scattered beneath the trees, as if something had died and left its bones behind.

I stacked them into order, a quiet penance, wood laid like confession, waiting for flame -an offer of absolution.

by nightfall, the pyre had become its own cathedral- fire rising, sparks threading upward through surrendering smoke, winking out between the stars.

I sat awhile, watching as if learning some forgotten language- the crackle, the hush, the dance of light devouring its own creation.

why is flame so captivating? its beauty is peril dressed in golden expiration, fragile, flickering, yet able to undo a world without hesitation

a fire asks for nothing but all of itself.

I see it in me sometimes- unresolved embers consuming my days, old griefs that flare again when the wind shifts.

still, I watch the burn. because something in the ash reminds me that all endings glow, at least once, before they darken- and maybe the warmth was worth it.

[cherokeeghostwriter]

november

my heart races at the thought of it.

i can’t see my own face without a mirror- why should a poem of mine look back at me with any hint of grace?

the words once came like whispers- a ghost leaning close as i walked through my day. now the voice is faint, an echo from a hallway i can no longer quite discern.

age has thinned the distance between silence and despair. i fumble for meaning, for the leap my younger self once made without thinking.

now i write to make space- to push these borrowed thoughts an arm’s length away, watching them settle into shapes i might recognize, even if only in this muted light- hoping some part of me still remembers how to speak.

[cherokeeghostwriter]

birthplace

i grew up in spaces too wide for one child’s voice. a backyard that swallowed afternoons, and solitude, that never answered my call.

i remember silence, how it lingered after my footsteps. how it folded itself into blankets, into stars, and the spaces between unanswered questions.

somewhere, i began to bury things before they were lost. as if loneliness could be planted in the ground, in the dirt. -hidden.

i returned once to my birthplace. -years too late hoping that the earth might remember me. that the ground might open up and welcome my misplaced soul. but everything had grown unrecognisable without me.

my memories were there, but that place was gone. the trees, stripped of their sanctity, and the house with all of its resemblance, no longer knew my name.

[fille--de--joies]

Froth

I've tried to find their trace in the froth of days. Then roamed about the moon and got bored too soon. I crafted outer spaces set with inner stars. But no matter the places when the soul's buried in Mars.

I've tirelessly sought in aligned constellations, the weakness, the fault of my own condemnation. I hoped for a future, yet it scared them away; it quelled the rapture they've too often delayed.

I've looked for rhyme or reason in the lines of fate. I've mistaken the season and always been too late. I thought I'd climb a mountain but somehow missed the start. The chest lets out a fountain burst from an orphan heart.

And slowly I'll forget all the bruises I get for aiming way too high when I've no wings to fly.

✒️ F. J.

[serandori]

Moonbody, Bloodsalt Trustee

She thinks I do not believe in lakes. But it’s not belief I lack. It’s forms of trust— in things that pretend to be calm.

I never said lake. I never said anything. I came and stood beside her and left the words in my chest— old nets drying in sunless wind.

She has white hair now. Or maybe that is mine. Time folds strangely by the water.

She thinks I came to see her. But I came to remember how much the body can carry in silence. How much a shoreline can take before it forgets our name.

I have always mistrusted dawn. For what it reveals— what returns, what refuses to leave.

She prays the sun away. Whispers to it like it is a god she once loved and now regrets.

She doesn’t know I, too, once begged the sun. But I did it secretly— in the gap between inhale and exhale, in the years before she was.

She bleeds into the water. Strange things, she says. As if anything we give the world is clean. As if our blood has not always been a kind of offering.

I do not believe in lakes because they mirror. Because they remember too much. Because they will not forgive even when they seem still.

I watch her from the edge. She doesn’t turn. She doesn’t need to. She is already becoming what I never could be. What I never told her I tried to be.

Moonlight touches her shoulders. She does not flinch. She belongs now. And I— only here to keep watch.

[cherokeeghostwriter]

I wandered out again -just the yard, same patch of grass, same trees reaching up like they’re asking something I no longer have the words for. They go further than I’ve ever been, and that comforts me more than it should. I used to think I needed to know everything. That not knowing was a failure, some stain I had to scrub out. But now? Now I feel like that desire was handed to me in a quiet room, while I wasn’t looking, and I took it like a cup of water, grateful, obedient.

I’ve started noticing how much of my life was built on borrowed certainty. Things that used to feel like stone now feel like paper -wet, dissolving. The world is shrinking around the edges, and I feel like I’m being folded in with it.

And you -your presence is like the first light of something I don’t yet believe in. Like the possibility of mercy. I cling to that. Like dew does to a rose it knows it can’t keep. Hope, it turns out, is heavier than fear. where the trees go

wandering the yard again, barefoot in the hush- there are trees out back that stretch into places I’ve never been.

there is comfort in that. the not-knowing. a kind of permission to stop reaching for every answer as if it might save me.

I think now I never truly wanted to know everything- that wanting was somehow planted in me while I wasn’t looking.

I’ve lived long under the spell of certainty. but lately, I feel the edges curling inward. the world shrinking like wool in warm water.

I find myself -fragile and oddly awake.

I’ve clung to you like dew on a rose- held fast by this first light of compassion, this dawning hope that scares me more than the dark ever could.