noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, Sage Ravenwood is highlighted.
Hold on to your seats, readers. Sage Ravenwood's poems will take you for the veritable ride: "A wood fence dancer; Don’t step on the cracks / or you’ll break Mama’s back sidewalk skipper;". The imaginative and emotional quality of these poems is unflinching: "The push back after the shove / Shadowboxing hope into malleable surrender". The camera eye does not look away and does not miss a thng: "Much like a heart without a father /
You have to be there to save someone". The ride these poems take you on was always there but you did not know it.
Smokefall
Might We Be Magic
Animalistic
They Will Come for You
Ghost of My Future Selves
What the Lawnmower Coughed Up
I Lost January
When Slumber Giants Awake
Empty Placate Wordage
Penumbra following in my footsteps
like a younger sister idolizing saint big sister.
A wood fence dancer; Don’t step on the cracks
or you’ll break Mama’s back sidewalk skipper;
Childhood’s invisible friend, performing
a magician’s disappearing act when it gets
dark outside. Twilights lonely cleave
when the light is washed from the day’s tendrils.
The most incredible fade when the storm
rolls in and tears turn eyes into gauze.
Silhouette temporarily trapped in a chalk outline.
A nebulous body replacing mine in the night,
pretending the nightmare slipping through my door
isn’t real. I wear the scars and she cloaks
pain in umbra’s shade. Come daybreak
an obscura hand will slip in mine.
A smokefall body following close behind.
I’m never alone. My shadow and I,
what stories we could tell
if the light allowed us to stay whole.
No sleight of hand Tricks up our sleeves
Luminescent stars glimpsed between tree boughs
Fog waifs pretending to be early morning dew
Gravel crunching under footsteps remembering home
Long evening walks Sky on fire Days dying embers
Discovering lost letters tucked in books
when an argument still simmers
When everything that can be said is in the eyes
A season of letting dead things go Burnt leaves
Colder days and shorter nights hurried steps
Warm fires Dank rot
Never feeling more alive hedonistic
The sun’s blazing gallop across daybreak
in hot pursuit of insomnia phantasms
Crabapple trees windswept petals
reminding us old man winter snores
Rain collecting all our tears rippling into a river’s exhale
A Red-tail hawk’s wings shadow playing with sunlight
Arms holding love close and tight in a hug
even when they are empty
All the unspoken things held in a smile across a room
Sun kissed daydreams behind orange eyelids
Storm chasing kids on bikes
lightening in their veins thunderstruck pedaling
Wizened toothless grins accompanying a playful wink
Street signs daring you to pick a never been road
The slow roll of car driving by a deer
captured in it’s gaze beside the highway
The women who run with beast
The men who swim their depths
Forest creatures breathing life into dead trees
All the rogue Animalia of our awareness
holding life captive What magic is this
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. – Mary Oliver
There is nothing soft about me Mary
I’m all taut muscles a counter force to effete
Ice and glass are shattered by cold Am I
Hide cured and stretched thin pounded
The push back after the shove
Shadowboxing hope into malleable surrender
eating crow the dissenting saboteur
I’m the sentient punching bag that feels too much
not enough Yet will split under the duress of trauma
Tender as in yielding as in lost resolve
Cut and dried like lamb’s wool
Which of us needed it more
A wilding removed from her wilderness
while suburban sprawl devastates everything
Societies forgotten indigenous left on the roadside
The newest missing broadside stapled to a pole
Sharped edged as silica glass lightning fused
My jagged ends life blading forbearance
There is no belonging in this familia of yours
Despair has nicked my bones brittle long before age
Even innocence abandons a child eventually
This child to that man’s stamina
Where is the soft in dying things Mary
What forge made you gentle enough to become
succulent wisdom to be partaken communion
I will give your innocence claws
I’ve seen morning dew glisten under first light
while watching the shadows gather their haints
Words spoken from silent lips with tell-tale eyes
I fear the softness you speak of
muffling what I’ve come to know
Some animals are all teeth and talons meat-eaters
Some are prey the soft animal
my body has already been devoured
by your familial things
Pick up a rock to skip;
Palm sized, mostly flat, wedged-shaped.
Not circular, more jagged.
This one needs to be heavier than normal.
Breathe deep the night air.
Swallow each inhale as if liquid courage.
Make sure you choose a dark night;
A new moon phrase is best of all.
Strength is held between thumb and middle finger,
index finger straddling the edge.
Thumb on top as if your trying to win,
a thumb wrestling championship.
Pretend the rock is a baseball;
play catch, toss it up in the air
and catch it when it comes back down.
Play toss for awhile.
You can see fine, the neighbor’s floodlights
keep the dark at bay bright as any sunset.
How’s your arm, limber, warmed up?
Plant your left foot. Line your shoulders up,
Eye your target. Aim. Put your body into the throw;
Smile. You’re not skipping
stones across the sky tonight.
Pop. The lightbulb shatters. Glass raining every which way.
That adrenaline pumping through your heart?
Don’t worry. Pick up another rock. Listen,
to the night come alive as one by one
houses go dark and neighbors pour from their homes;
Ants scurrying to see who disturbed their hive.
You have a bag full of skipping stones.
Throw another and another, aim true.
When it’s all over stare up at the sky.
Do they see this gift you’ve given them?
Do they understand now?
In all of heaven there is nothing to compare,
seeing the stars light up the sky, a universe waiting.
No longer blinded by porch lights, streetlights.
Yes, they will come for you. Remember this moment when
you decided to peel back suburbia’s curtain
and freed the night-sky;
A gift once given can’t be taken back.
Van Gogh, I finally see your stars.
The future watches reliving
today tomorrow yesterday
Each page flipping forward and back
One day after another moving in unison
An animated flip book with one word
Etched on the cover Life
See all those dog-eared pages
I’m saving them to remember but I’m
ripping this one out
and that one too
We can’t leave her there help her please
Give me the damn book back
That’s my life you lost our place
Flip all you want I know how it ends
Not this future hers
he robbed her childhood
I don’t know whose book this is
Did child me know I was with her
in some long-ago memory
I saw what leered waited in the dark
Déjà vu we’ve been here before
It ends to begin again
Ghost of ourselves killing time
In some future past to save the one before
torn pages flipping in the wind
Kehua playing god with our selves
I can see my breath cigarette billowed
Slipping around in navy neoprene mud boots
I’m the neighborhood compost comedian
Mowing wet grass into a snarling chokehold
Leveraging the sputtering machine on an incline
chewing and spitting up wilding grassland
Slender blades of grass bent over in supplication
Suburban crop circles with sunken wheel grooves
Seriatim aching shoulders blistered palms
A gas hogs due for choking blades with wet lashings
Cumulonimbus rainbows butchered
with a sunbeam’s carving knife
Revenge rides a downpour raining a parade
Breath deep the chill air Stupefied by neighbors
delirious need to cut nature out of home
Spring mows swathes of hurt NY hands over April
Right before May’s arrival without flowers
Inside my home layered fragrances comfort smells
TokyoMilk’s Bulletproof perfume skipped a shower
Clove Cigarette lip balm wishing for a smoke
Cloistered scents of safe sending hope spiraling
Catkins float the air like dandelion wishes
Ostara’s shuck and jive lawn masquerade
Season’s haunt inside out before the turn
I wouldn’t trade dog breath for summer’s quaking aspen
fat bottomed leaves clapping merriment
When the rain returns choke the lawnmower
with grass-stained prayers no one is listening
A walk-in freezer of days
Keeping the dead fresh until Spring
With the sun’s first breath
The sky turns the color of milky flesh
And January will always keep my dad
On a slab somewhere
Waiting for the ground to thaw
The frozen soil doesn’t want him either
Veins more alcohol than blood
A walking pickled skin suit
All sour breath and rotting teeth
His body dead long before
If you count the stench of unbathed days
This never-ending month
All the holiday glut left behind
Hoarfrost skittering across windows
In this bleak wintertide blitzkrieg
Plumes of condensation escapes my lips
An essence of me escaping him
The neighbors slip and slide ice dance
A sad reminder like all memories
We never danced together
And every time I walk out the door
Each footstep cracks beneath my weight
Like all bones and promises
Much like a heart without a father
You have to be there to save someone
And kids weren’t supposed to raise parents
I don’t know where they buried him
Every January I pull up a chair to the table
In this frigid expanse of a month
His corpse still frozen
For once he has to listen
In this hollow ache
I tell him everything
About a daughter who’s relieved
This macabre show is over
Spider knitted cumulus slip, cascading
down around mountain ankles, foot soak;
Into a mesosphere river meandering through
the suburban cobbled valley below. Dew
kisses moon’s wild offspring into hiding.
Haints whisper taunts to nights receding
dark welkin. Pups reappear and disappear
again, mist spirits playing a game as old
as time on a fog laden morning. Scent of
damp earth and dark coffee tussling for
dominance. Devil may care pups in pursuit
of disappearing wafting shroud monsters.
Spun tendrils silk webbing, catcher’s mitt
sticky caught. We are flies in Mimir’s head.
I don’t want your pain.
The Rorschach inkblot shadows
crawling across your features;
Tell-a-tale headspace scrawled
across a face I don’t recognize.
Heart ratchet hurt leaving
another scar to diced heartbreak’s
disemboweled need to be there.
What do you want me to say?
Empty placate wordage holding
a paring knife at nerves ending.
Who am I to witness this life?
My understanding twisting
the blade deeper still. Can you
see your reflection in me?
No shoulders are that broad;
Weighed under, bent at the waist,
ducking consequences tendering.
What were you asking of me?
This carrying? Hurt buried
under so many added pounds
you can’t lose for the breaking.
Smother the exhale. I felt
the intake of hope strangling you
from across the room. I don’t want
to watch you suffer.
Sage Ravenwood is a deaf Cherokee woman residing in upstate NY with her two rescue dogs, Bjarki and Yazhi, and her one-eyed cat Max. She is an outspoken advocate against animal cruelty and domestic violence. Her work can be found in Glass Poetry - Poets Resist, The Temz Review, Contrary, trampset, Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Pioneertown Literary, Grain, Sundress Press anthology - The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry, Gothic Blue Book Volume VI - A Krampus Carol, The Rumpus, Smoke & Mold, Lit Quarterly, PØST, and Massachusetts Review.
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