Rom Com

You reach a certain age when you know
the difference between a play bark and a warning bark
even when you don’t have dogs.

At about this same time, you realize why
you’ve always hated the films about adorable people
and a universe that yearns

to promote them to the nuptial industrial complex
of sudden, final happy endings that have nothing and everything
to do with strip center glass massageries.

If you watch one more young woman puff
her hair out of her eyes with exasperation,
you will become an arsonist with extreme prejudice,

torching the little bakery, the precious bookstore,
the darling cafe, the sweet, white gazebo
and snow-frosted holiday inn

but leaving this stand, untouched: a tiny diner
with grease-lacquered walls where the cook
leans over his partition with tragic eyes

and informs me the waffle iron has a short
and he cannot make it work. By this time,
alternatives are fine — I say yes to pancakes

and yes to the chance of forgiveness
that I begged you to ask for and you did
and I said yes, your words in a box of robin’s egg blue.

Bring up the music in the soundtrack, whether incidental
or Gladys Knight — neither one of us will remember
and neither, thank the stars, will sing along

with battered spoons held up like microphones.
We have weirder fish and grits to fry.
Delivered on those thick, dishwasher-hot platters

is a rolling-out red carpet of make-up nonsex, nonsense
with fate giving the laces of our sneakers a reassuring yank
and tying the bow loops in an overhand for safety.

And we will run, a car packed with pink and blue suitcases,
a plaid Thermos and a drowsy leopard,
blowing a pop stand of personal grievance.

The whole diner is applauding now, with me wanting
the whole of this tear-stained and bloody, badly written world
to have what I’m having.

____________________________________

Jennifer Keith writes and plays bass for the rock band Batworth Stone. Her poems have appeared in The Free State Review, Best American Poetry 2015, and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist for the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, won the 2023 Able Muse Book Award and is due out in 2024. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

_____________

FIRST PLACE
Catherine Carter

$100 and publication in the Bay to Ocean Journal, and free admission to the annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference
____________________________________

When You Stop by High Noon for a New Pierce

first Jordyn measures   then the deep
hard helix pinch punches
cartilage apart to receive
the two-millimeter dangle
of silver crescent moon
the spangle of movement   the moment
of glint.       Because  today
the parents are still well
enough to ask later    why but why
would you want to?     Because today
you can walk and cycle and paddle
a kayak named after a shark      Because

today     alive in a life
not even a millisecond long for a shale slice
    or the garnet grit of shore-sand
        let alone a moon
you have and you are
a body         opening
 its needle-sized wound
to  frivolity  adornment  celebration
Because

the noon wind fills the leaves’ bright sails       Because tonight
all night     you will feel    inside the curve
of your shell-whorled ear
        tugging at the tides and the tilt
of earth’s axis     turning
one face always toward you        one always away
the tiny moon
shine and chime