The stars on the flag started falling off when Private Walker returned home to Tennessee after six months of being in country in Afghanistan. - At Camp Leatherneck on the treadmill he folded five points to pentagrams, imagined fireworks nova his welcome back. - The flag rarely flapped in the arid silence of base camp.…
Making It- Midway (A Movie Poem)
Stella remembers when the Zeros flew thru her backyard and she saw Pearl Harbor in flames, blue bodies bouncing on the waves. - Afterward, welders melted the steel of capsized destroyers hoping to rescue any upside down survivors. - Her Billy drafted six months before would fly Wildcats in the Marshall Islands and in the…
The Shining 2 or Doctor Sleep (A Movie Poem)
The earlier horror leaves DT a broken drunken man building smaller worlds within worlds, boxes within boxes, memories within smaller memories to keep the monsters from eating the shining he has left. - He is forever moving to the same room with different people. - “We are all dying”, he thinks, “The world is one…
Film Noir or Motherless Brooklyn (A Movie Poem)
In the rear view mirror he can see the specters.. - her upside down reflection scatter when a foot hits the puddle… - hear the notes of a trumpet solo popping thru the open red door of a jazz club… - remembers when they whacked his partner… - and left their footprints on his ribs..…
Harriet (A Movie Poem)
1. The biggest tree exists to neither swing nor sway, doesn’t wait for a strong wind to emancipate it from roots, to be turned into freedom papers to be torn up by the master. - The swing was created by the master, to exist until the limb snaps and the sway of blood to earth…
Community Garden
The bulldozers and jackhammers blasted the concrete away clearing it of water, aggregate, cement, tearing it down to the soil until it buzzed with reclamation, smelled of loam and petrichor, the release of geosmin in the stirring, ozone expelling with first lightning and rain, surface bubbles releasing aerosols like fresh baked bread from the oven…
The Singularity or Terminator: Dark Fate (A Movie Poem)
The machine that replaces you and the one that ascends you will fight it out on the factory floor. - Ultimately, it’s another machine, the gun, that will save you from a lethal precision that can cut flies in midair. - Put a hundred cops between you and the singularity and you get one hundred…
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Oncology Nurse
Every touch is a devotion, every soft phrase a prayer to life, to continue living. - A nightingale, a dove gowned in heavenly blue a ministering survival chant. - Thank you and double checks are abundant. - They minister consistent kindness for they live among the blasted. - There is no sniping, no rivalries, just…
Okay
“Are you okay?”, my wife asks when I cough. - “No. I’m fine. Yes. I’m not”, I respond, - stumping her in the poetic irony of words that - encompass the yes and no and the in between. - She flips the finger at me and I return the bird to the nest. - We…