Featured Poet: Rachel Bright
Rachel Bright is a New York native and graduate of Binghamton University, where she helped found Ellipsis literary magazine. Her work aims to capture unique images and is most greatly influenced by nature. In her free time she enjoys hiking, baking, and excessive amounts of optimism. She currently lives in Plainview, New York.
CAN’T CURE
I feel bad that I let you age
near the shoeboxes we kept and
the pictures that (took forever to)
never change frames.
Heart didn’t mind and
(my beet red) head didn’t know
how the moon cheats out a rhythm.
Ignorant, I can’t cure the time.
BUS BLUE
Salome can’t wake me
she’s busy on the notables.
Joke’s on us dolls nesting, blank,
in the cabinets of bus 7853. Inbound.
Runs in a loop.
Inbound, outbound, round-bound.
I hear there’s a park one street over,
said troubled teens loiter
there, fists in hair
before a punch is thrown.
Salome can’t save me
I don’t speak her fire. I’m talking
to babe on a phone on a blue bus,
marble statue, and I see the inside
of my hat brim twink red,
off, twink again, off.
You’re not the one they’re chasing.
I doze on every route
running after 7pm.
Joe, fading by the po po.
NEAR GREENBOW
Guys would always smile and tell me I sneezed
the way flimsy metal chairs unfolded –
abruptly, but with soul.
I guess that’s the charm that made door
handles turn and fairy lights glow.
Though the farmhouse doesn’t have any
fairy lights, sometimes our pattering
footsteps would go there instead. Many
times we’d settle for a hardwood table that
felt like it’d been rubbed to matte
softness by the sound of the ocean.
The only water by us was in the air.
Still, humid summers were magic.
They made my gold earrings shine like
two nuggets just plucked from a stream.
On days when it rained I’d run to our destination
so I could feel the play-doh clay
sop through my boot cuffs before we’d
jive on, ending with sleepy eyes. Falling
eyelids like marine snow to the ocean floor.
A while after this show started getting old
I lost a straw hat along the asphalt. Clumsy.
Some other girl wore it to school a week later.
The ice cubes in mama’s sweet kompot
started to crack the way high-heels do,
and I recognized inferno waiting for me.
I sneeze, a fact and no event now.
KIND THINGS
Most years you can see the groundhogs
peeking out under the latticed porch.
A big one will hurdle over
its rolls to champion the day
while geriatric, watery domes fall
off shrubs, forgetting they’ll be back.
A new coming of the sun-lit sky
surprises the burrowers and
you know they must be so fearful
to think each year’s light sky is
not coming again.
Can’t tell them
about the house though, and all
the days we’ve hid in its bellows.
1800s panes, jam-jars of time.
They can’t see their spring match
our winter for routine surprises –
they don’t believe the sun and I
don’t believe you’re home,
safe, out of the snow. Maybe the
dew can tell them about how love
and all the kind things leave us
many times again before their end.
