Sections | Poetry | The Sun Magazine #7

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Poetry

Poetry

FaceTime

I held an iPad for Miguel as he lay in his hospital bed / so he could see his family sheltered at home. / He was suffocating, this man who at the worst of times / would only tell his loved ones, Me siento bien. / All around us the equipment of life / and death was buzzing, humming, beeping, / a stubborn choir of mockingbirds.

By Peter Young November 2021
Poetry

The Wedding Gift

From the moment Ashlee asked me to be a bridesmaid, / I understood what my wedding gift needed / to be. It wasn’t the set of tumblers / I shipped her from 14th Street, daffodils and dandelions / climbing the sides. It wasn’t helping her angel of a mother / practice her speech, making pencil marks for pauses / and every deep breath. No, my gift / to Ashlee started when she told me Cate from college / would be a bridesmaid, too.

By Emily Sernaker November 2021
Poetry

Steady Daylight

Today in heaven / my father turned 105. / Finally working steady daylight, / he’s got it knocked: / eight to four, / double time and a half, / no asbestos, / no shoveling slag / on the open hearth, / no boss, / thirteen weeks vacation annually, / kingdom come. / The union up here takes zero shit.

By Joseph Bathanti October 2021
Poetry

Jewish Community Center Entrance, July 1971

It’s dark and I don’t feel / at all well and my mother / will soon arrive to take me / home and the overripe aroma / of the hedges with the tiny / white flowers is making me / want to throw up but I’m / not alone because a fellow / counselor-in-training, / my first friend who is a boy, / has left the camp sleepover / to wait with me

By Michele Herman October 2021
Poetry

Fifteen Strokes Of Luck

The first was that I was no longer in pain; I could sleep. / The second was that I was finally able to love: all my life I had been more or less shut. / The third was that I lived near a pond. Watching the mallards dunk made me laugh. I was happy looking at dragonflies and even their empty exoskeletons, their shells shaking a little in the wind.

By Ellery Akers October 2021
Poetry

A Few Days After My First Vaccine

Walking by the lake, I lose an earring / and don’t even notice it at first, / overwhelmed as I am / by the strangeness of everything.

By Alison Luterman September 2021
Poetry

Intensive Outpatient

On our way back from a Mother’s Day celebration in Newport Beach / my sister turned to me & said, Have you ever thought about treatment for your / eating disorder? For years the only eating disorder in the house was hers.

By Jeremy Radin September 2021
Poetry

Almost Cha-Cha

I tell people that when I was born, my mother / was on drugs, and so she named me Brett. / But what I don’t tell them is that she almost / named me Charlotte and wanted to call me / Cha-Cha.

By Brett Jenkins September 2021
Poetry

It’s Friday Afternoon In The Florida State Penitentiary And The Men Read Poetry

and Ronnie says Robert Hayden got / it right, a whipping be like that — “the face that I no longer / knew or loved” — damn, that’s it, right there and / Ronnie doesn’t blame his mama for beating him so bad, but / maybe she could have kept her pipe in the car and then maybe / he never would have ended up in a foster home

By Laurie Uttich July 2021
Poetry

The Buttonhook

My son sprinted to each traffic light / in his black hat and dark Sabbath suit / while the elderly congregation two miles away / waited for him to help lead morning prayers.

By Yehoshua November June 2021