Category: poetry
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Daylight Saving Time
The clocks leap forward and I fall back looking for you to return from dust blessedly at the stroke of two this night. ¡Despiértate! (Wake up!) Es muy muy tarde Madre Mia. (It’s very very late My Mother.) Gather yourself. School is over and it is time, not too too late for you to teach…
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The Great Tornado
She knows the winds in the circles of all that’s around her. The funnel is as twisted as the screaming man on the wall hanging in the serenity of white space, crosses and orbs flying up like zephyr elms. Her face breaching its anvil. Her little brick house pirouetting…
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Memory Jug
When I die fill my memory jug with things my mother loved. Leave out her tears, the shivering in the rain. That heart on the silver cross, keep it, the scrap she wrote my future name on, the ink footprints on my baptismal certificate. But not the bandage from my first…
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Flying into the Demilitarized Zone
The eagle brushstroked black talons to beak broke red blue in the white sky tiny scarlet prey fought and died in once soft grasp matron touch a child freely loved plumped fed and feathered in aerie tall safe high from screech and whoop the drop to the loops of barbed wire below
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Bronze Disease
Put two copper artifacts next to each other, and in time, they will turn green from the attraction. Bronze Disease is what the conservators call it. For them, corrosion is the enemy. But that is not true, as poets and most others know: Corrosion is life, Rust is love.
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Never Call the Evil Whales Forth By Name
Never summon the evil whales forth lest they hunger for a salt’s murder or seek to ravage their ship. They cry out havoc, scream tempest to the ocean and sky so the illhveli hear not their name. Their harpooned blubber boils neither to heaven nor hell but vanishes only inside the soul. …
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Self Portrait
I walk from there to there to paint myself into black pixels, my shadow following obediently part of the hobbled sketch. I draw myself as a wobbly line, ill aligned and always misplaced near the horizon Above are scrawled illegible words written in a shaky handwriting, below exists the gurgle of my bowels…
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My Google History
I search Google Sky and there is a night picture. Yellow dots top and bottom in fluttering butterfly waves: too many to count, small red and white dots: 20 per square inch, medium red and blue orbs: 10 per quadrant, red orbs with devil’s tail: 10 falling down red, purple, blue orbs with halos:…
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The World Is Louder than You
Everything louder than the earth spinning under you will make you doubt you are alive.
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Icarus, She Flies
image: Jacob Peter Gowy’s The Fall of Icarus (1635–1637) A daughter dies, and she is found, in the cerulean movements of birds. Not a hawk. Mother Sky says those are for boy’s souls. The father sees mockingbirds building a nest of pine twigs in the corner frieze of the portico and imagines a flash…
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Not a Bird Song
The not not bird listens to its not not song in the not not tree near my not not door. And in its song it hears something not not grand compared to all the other not not birds in all the other not not lands. The not not bird doesn’t know all…
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Persimmons and Pomegranates
I. All through elementary school blonde beautiful lip reading teachers would try to correct my “th”s by snaking their tongues between their teeth and holding it there, ripe cherries tempting me to bite into them. This was the one thing my withdrawn self throbbing with the first thrusts of male enthusiasm couldn’t stop thinking…
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Sentinels
The sentinels stand silently guarding the monuments from rioting against their shadows. One guard counts the sunshine, the other the dark. The piss and shit, the broken glass can never be really cleaned up. The stench just follows the tour through the purple velvet queue. The glass bleeds the feet of those who sold their…
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Where Waldo Is Not
The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be have him the tiniest spot at the very top in a population of near clones. After searching everywhere he will be the last thing you’ll find, the last thing you’ll see. Your life will have meaning again after generations of searching and playing the game. …
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Housekeeping
We birth a thousand destined broken things: chair legs detach from their seats under the weighted repetition of sitting cloth itself threadbare from the rubbing of muscle. We glue together the blue China fallen in grief. The silver nails of the crib are reserved for our rusty coffins. We mend…
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Steve Earle Sings His Son’s Songs
“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder spoke to the younger over the phone, knowing that his child had inherited all his demons. “I will support you if you want to do rehab,” he whispered, that old Harry Chapin Song, Cat’s in the Cradle, about fathers and sons circling in his head; his…
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A Gun and a Hotel Bible
No bad guy talks alone to a Bible in a hotel room with a gun in his hand. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death…” the good book says or he thinks in a cold sweat. …
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The Star
It comes like He came on the longest, darkest night of the longest darkest year proclaiming all the glory of God and the beauty of planets and suns. The old gods have been exiled to the sky and their movements are barely the echoes of the Grand Breath. Apollo and Selene have long…
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All Creatures Great and Small
For a week a blue fly buzzed around our apartment subsisting on our Pomchi’s water, kibble and kitchen counter crumbs and dodging attempts by my wife to swat it. I used to catch flies quite easily in my palm and release them back to their natural estates but since my colon surgery the bugs…
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Wolfwalkers
The town exists in harsh geometry, the forest— a fiery flow. The wolf leaps above their soul, a crescent moon. Run the wolf. Flee the wolf. Don’t go beyond the wall lest you be devoured. When the wolf howls they make work their prayer, their protection. They pray a whole…
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A Wedding Dress Story
She didn’t want this wedding dress to be a widow, alone, encased in plastic in the unused dark of the closet, moved after spring cleaning to the basement near the leaky window, after five years moth-balled to the old unopened hope chest of her mother’s closet, weeping, weeping, weeping for the man she lost, subsisting…
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Living All the Eclipses
As the moon dips behind Earth’s faint outer shadow in penumbral eclipse an imperceptible darkness seizes my soul in fear I wait futilely, like the ancients, for the next blood red cycle to engulf the world in ignorance and violence, the next monster to bite the earth into a crescent slice. They once…
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Going to the Sock Hop by Herself
She dances alone, the black child in the yellow dress. Alone amongst the black and white oxfords, the ivory Buster Browns, the brown penny loafers with smiling Abe Lincoln’s looking up to her from the confines of their penny keepers. Her white socks touch the polished mahogany hopping silently to the beats…
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Small Axe: Lovers Rock
The music is the scent in the air that changes everything. “I’ve got no time to lie, I’ve got no time to play your silly games,” it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt pairing off the lovers from the pretenders, shedding bodies to kiss and writhe in adjacent rooms or the nearest alley until…
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Identifying Features
My mother wanted me to go away. I hardly sent her anything. From behind, we all look alike.
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Thanksgiving for Two
Due to the pandemic the children are not coming. The adults will set a table for two and wait for the zoom chat after the game with the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Football Team formerly known as the Redskins. They will double their Thanksgiving feast of Burger’s Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced City ham,…
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Small Axe: Mangrove
All you wicked men what is wrong with you? There is no black Justice seen on the Sistine Chapel. Only the stupidities that can make a stuff bird laugh- the small axe ready to cut the big tree down. Based loosely on theSteve McQueen anthology of films. The first in the series is…
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Sitting With My Mother
In the early morning rise, my mother and I take a ride to the hospital where I was born and she has her dialysis treatments. Her feet, wrinkled and bruised, exhausted are raised on a leather pedestal. They remind me of Grandma’s heavy black nylons that pooled around her ankles as she prayed…
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Arcane Torso Mistakenly Posted to Pornhub
The steel bar that holds the torso up gives it a spine and makes it art and not some headless, armless, genital-less mutilation pushed from a machine going faster than the white signs allowed. I see it only on my iPhone, backlit with its perfect abs and cum-gutters not unlike the headless fuckers penetrating endless…
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Defining the Difficult Word Inside Her
I plea for my mother’s spirit to wait for me before the ascension because I want to know more beyond her sun, moon and stars; for her to show me the other colors hidden inside her; shades my crafted words can only reflect in broken shards. She draws me a symbol for a word…
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Meghan Places a Poppy on John’s Grave
On the 11th month, the 11th day, at the 11th hour, Meghan wore her poppy on the right side at 11 O’clock, just like her father, John McCain taught her. Holding her newborn girl Liberty close to her— and taking care not to disturb the many small flags proudly fluttering— she placed another poppy exactly…
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Time Pieces
I. 1. The poem parses time into syllables and the syllables reach out to hold you in the embrace of your grandmother’s words, the light touch of motherly praise, the squirm of a daughter’s protestations, the first gurgling phonemes of the womb advancing to meaning, dissolving to memory. 2. The grandfather clock travels in grandfather…
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Blue Shoe
The blue shoe on the side of the road had me wondering who it belonged to. Yes, shoes are made for journeying, poised for leaping not yet taken. They shine with this potential right off the factory line. Yet, this orphan once so stiff when young, once a tender, warming friend…
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Cairns and Crows
The cairns are mothered by murders of crows— four stones as black as raven eggs, others sky blue with specks of black, pointing this way to heaven, pointing this way to hell, or is it to Tecumseh’s grave, the bones of all buffaloes? But then crows are great tricksters, erecting…
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Sea Church
Rising from the watery mist the grey sea church blesses the waves and prays to the sky, lonely, unadorned, a silver carven wing, folded in limbo, as its sea bells peel out the redemption of sand and stone. Its three pillars drawn from sea’s breath are stained aquamarine, and on its grey stone altar,…
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La Isla de Munecas: A Day of the Dead Poem
Orphaned from the girl who bought and loved them the dolls were packed tightly into a suitcase and floated gently down the canals of Xochimico to the Isla de Munecas and into the waiting embrace of Don Julian Santana Barrera. In the unpacking, a girl doll, a life-size two-year-old, with a dress, hand-work all…
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Piano Fade
The piano player has already been shot. He is no longer a musician, less one that sold-out halls. Once he turned the river’s chant into a jazz so fine that fish weeped. Now, he plays only right-handed counterpoint. His left is still paralyzed, even after a year of PT. He only…
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Breaking Horsepower
The black stallion runs onto the tracks headlong into the train’s cycloptic light attempting to break its horsepower. He refuses to yield to gravity touching his feet and grounding him into mammal again: sweat, hair, lungfuls of air, refuses to slip his nose through another hard halter. His head and hind legs…
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Clutter
It soothes me to keep the clutter of the past in picture albums on my cell phone: mother’s yellow dresses, ashes in weighted urns, brittle birth and death certificates, enough heirlooms to make a portable history, things heavy enough to resist memory’s drift, for when the hills blaze up and I have to evacuate, leave…
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The Cursed Land
Long the land watches for death or harvest amongst the lulling black mounds a slumber in piles, huddled so neatly without blankets from the shivering wind blowing meanly under the sway of the killing night’s climb. Underneath are all bones, life clutching the long tilled soil, the farmer’s harlot oft despoiled, denied wages, seeds…
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The Great Horned Night Owl Screeches My Name
The Great Horned Night Owl screeches my name and I whisper back that it’s wrong. Look around the block, across the coast there is the soul that you seek. She shifts to the closest oak limb tapping just outside my window. Bruja Buho both witch and owl my grandmother called her, …
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Drownings
It’s easy for them to slip into the ice, the big crack of nonjudgmental water, absorbed entirely in the joy of now. First winter blankets them, then the frost, the quiet, until the last of their woolens, the black and red squares of their scarves, their blue and pink pompoms trailing down become the…
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The Blue Lurch of Train in Time
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Black Pieta
Strange fruit lives in the bones of black mothers, the blood of their sons, marrow of their daughters. Blue winds drift by full of poplar scents, aromas that never leave the maternal soul. They exhort their sons to be careful, be safe, make it back home. They know they…
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Living in the Mermaid’s Shadow
I watch my love, almost a mermaid, standing in the kiss of shoreline and ocean, washing sand from her glistening form. In the pause between tides I tie a hope line, strong as my inglorious life, to her toe. She swims through it, hardly noticing my intent, only her friends crowding around, reflecting…
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Heartbreak (poem)
Losing a child never known a mother known love found love lost memories remembered memories not remembered old man’s tears grief in womanly rags heartbreak
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Flowers
The only choice is blossoming in the terra cotta …
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Orphans
1. The motherless-fatherless God orphans the world in His own image, His experience, His own elevated thoughts. Yet He is unsatisfied, unhappy for His creation is not perfect enough. Even the little man with His breath-spark is an unfulfilling design, in tun dissatisfied. Everything has weight but nothing has fullness. …
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Moths
Luna moths flutter in the captive night light of early December, strong, determined to mate their way to the electric crackle (invisible as a secret trapped in the soul) emitting from the machine in the eaves. Their disintegration illuminates the dark with ultraviolet pulses and heavy musk drifting to mouthless, abandoned mates, antennae feeling…
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Paper
There is a certain satisfaction that comes with shrinking language and imagination to a rectangle, fitting black-and-white words into a prescribed length and width given human depth through inscription. The filled sheet of paper almost transcends its smoothness and thinness, its very blank expression and dullness. It reveals exactly what it is meant…
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River Ode
The lavender skin river whispered with a maiden’s call. Bonnet curls kissed her banks in a flush of forgiving tears for the trawlers bruising her mercy and calm, each departing an oily scar that dispersed in the flow, for the water is never mean this cold season to those that whip her …
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Casting
1. If there is wild moving water there is a trout in it waiting for the cast, the whip of line in air splashing a weigthless fly on the mirror surface luring the rainbow fish to break the heavy air for the angler’s fantasia. 2. The Rogue…
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The Yellow Bus Stop
The earth is black on both sides. The yellow bus taking the living away passes pile after pile of rubble, of signs that were once there: the Harley Davidson store, The Rogue Action Center- a nonprofit climate change group, the community bank – it’s vault the only thing standing. Indistinguishable from the ash is…
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The Dead Mother’s Children Kneeling in Love
White and red roses defend the mother’s coffin: cherry stained, her interlocked hands in prayer draped in veil gauze, her gold dress the same she married in, as the procession of her children grieves in a black and white flow. In a black and white flow, each child lights a votive candle that…
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Memory Monster
The memory monster haunted Mavette on the platform, the gym, pass the graveyard, scolding her for leaving the tiniest remains of food on her plate, scourged her for reading that dirty Jew, Levi. The swastikas chased her in her dreams. In her hole in the earth the dogs and stamping black boots would pass…
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Pareiodolia
The sand holds our faces. Every thousand grains forms a man, a woman, a child. Every millionth there is your mother- young, stunning, beauty mark perfectly spotted on right cheek. Every billionth adds a little weight, gray, tears and beaches of separation. Every trillionth might be the dirt blown away at…
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Plum Juice Runs Happy
You worked hard for the plum, to bite into the Mariposa before the heat comes and it rots. Its purple plumpness pulsates with juice, so dark and clear through and through. The comfort is not startling. It’s the taste you know from a thousand memories, What takes you back is the shock…
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The Blue Fish
I watched in the swirl, the blue fish paddle steadily away from the boat, knowing that it had been hooked before, the wound protruding wormlike from his jaw. Today would not be his last fight. He would not be a photo prize. He wanted not the weight of air, just the restless, endless flow…
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Take a Stand
https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992 With the start of NFL football yesterday, I must salute those brave and patriotic players and teams who take a stand against police brutality of black people. I must share this poem and video that my Miami Dolphins posted on Twitter. I stand in complete solidarity with the Dolphins on this issue. https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992 It…
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Smashing Glass
Smash the glass if you must, yet do it gently using soft hammers. Catch the fury in your breath and release its image on the pane. The goal is not destruction but creation, to leave behind something cracked yet still whole, hanging precariously together, a reminder that we are all shards about to fall. Tap…
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Abandoned Boat
The Little Bessy molts its white chipped, dull letters out to waves it cannot use. Capsized on the rocky Maine beach, where it once fished for lobster in richer anchors, the peapod displays its tattered nets on its hull while the Man O War, filled with a haul of tourists, bruises the gentle waves…
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The Chair and the Light Pulsing on Its Rails
Abandoned in the middle of the blasted field, its arms shredded, legs battered, the chair exists in broken splendor catching the best of the speckled light dancing in the quivering shadows. Lines of the seated father stain the backrest, motherly molds are left behind in the seat foam, the relentless kicks, tattoos of children’s feet…
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Living With a Rusty Christ
The clean church Christ hangs on rusty nails, dozen-fold years denied a resurrection, tied to everlasting pain and death, heaven denied, mortal redemption denied because the flesh, existing between hope and despair, refuses the soul’s release. The congregation is dead to peace, only knowing the scrapping of their knuckles on the smooth stone- dead…
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The Driver
The bus driver sees people as they really are: survivors & corpses going for regular treatment, shadows & lights moving in a tunnel, loved & loveless reflections in a rear view mirror, like him, the sufferers of whole-body vibrations of the potholes & uneven pavements of the road, the sedentary motion breaking their backs until…
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Growing the Forest
When your mother dies you grieve, vow to change, say a prayer, plant a memory tree. When your father dies you swallow hard, set yourself square, curse all his mistakes, and seed an oak. When your brother/sister dies you cry for the good times, regret their bad ones, carve their dreams in evergreens.…
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Touch
Lovers dream of cuddling, laying flat under the sky, hand to chin, chin to wrist, eyes never opening to harsh light, feet caressing toes among the daisies sway. In the past they loved erect, pulling close in multicolor hugs, their hands around waist in almost interlocking circles hoping for the full union of own…
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The Cursing Stones
Ariana, adopted the old Greek ways, when Nikos died diving for sponges. She encased her curses into two lead stones: smuggling one into his coffin, dropping the other into Naxos deepest well. She made sure Nikos soul would carry her curse to the underworld before it ascended to heaven, or activated fully on the river…
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Pieta
Perfection can only be seen in the descent, the glow of spotlights colliding to true whiteness, the realization that grief touches the ground. Mary, they say, you never experienced birth pains, but the linen folded eternally beneath your son shows that his final blessing transferred all to you. Your tears wash his feet,…
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Washing the Corpses
–After Rainier Maria Rilke The washers have lived with death as they have with the lamp, the flame and the dark, the nameless rinsing of limbs, the even more unnameable nameless. without histories relative to them. Their sponges dipped the water then the silent throat, trickled rivulets on their faces, waiting for it…
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Soft Body Memories of Our Grief
We exist in unkeepable bodies and in the bending over we decompose for we are are but the memory of grief that soft bodies leave when they die.
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After the Sun Has Gone
Oh, when the sun yields child to the soft caress of the night After the sun has gone. After the sun has gone. That lifts the wind after the sun has gone. The last of wonder and awe That turns life from a beach shell echo to a cornucopia after the…
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The Boy Who Dances in the Light
Shout into the eyes of sunlight of the boy who dances in the light. Every dragon’s death foretells this child onto even the smallest realm. The Phoenix is an ally to the boy who forges worlds. The stars proclaim his shine this boy who dances in the light. He is the…
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Rainy Weather Laughter
The rain chuckles on the rooftop and the sound carry’s down the house. The oaks in their amber raincoats hiss in the water’s tickle. Their sinuses suckle the drops to veins then shiver off the excess. The wild summer streams are beginning their running joke. The drought retreats with a frown…
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The Whale
We turned around and she was there stranded between shore and sea, beach filled with the oily smell of whale, her dark tonnage serenading the waves for the comforting echoes of others, her great fins offering sand flowers to the Great Ocean God for her salvation. We mistook her motion for the final dance,…
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A Very Hot Afternoon
The heat is a pendejo querida a street full of melda de vaca, mi amor steaming, stinking, like a hungry puta who takes mi dinero and gives me crabs. Sleep with me chica. Cool me down in el rio de su chocha. Por favor. Por favor. Mariposa de su womb. Pajaro en mi boca. Do…
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The Art of Dying
The Pandemic has closed the theaters and cinemas. On stage a lone actor commits suicide in the loneliness. On screen the two lovers run to each other against the march of soldiers. The actor’s death is an extravagant fake, a nod to the art of dying a good stage death. The…
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Dr. Faustus Thanks the Devil and the Word
The poem rumbles in my brain and wakes me at three in the morning as if my devil branded me with his pitchfork reminding me of our inspired bargain My nemesis love calls me to the fiery sheet his impish pride burning praise in me that swears fealty with bloody words Oh poetry…
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Beyond the Dying Cloud
When a cloud dies doves and eagles dip their wings in mournful ‘memberance. When the sky dies it rots black in despairing soot of ash and pain. When the moon dies it’s mourned by the elliptical kisses of the planets beyond. When a planet dies the universe gently cradles it and lullaby’s…
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Painfully Clear
I tried to bargain away all the sickness and death in my life with the skies and mountains. They refused to disperse my pain in the sunlight and clouds. The void rejected my life, eternity denied my love. The moon stayed its silent course watching my fate fade away in the night. Time denied my…
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On this Acre of Unspoiled Comfort
On this acre of unspoiled comfort the hard winds blow once again now. Through this acre of unspoiled comfort the house falls once again now. This acre of unspoiled comfort so unlike a broken cry. This acre of unspoiled comfort once so sun caressed with smiles. This acre of unspoiled comfort once standing on unburied…
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The Weight of Words
A woman’s beauty is light on the eyes, best pinned in thoughts, not weighed down by beautiful lines that cannot halt wrinkles. The dying frost of dawn does not feel sorry for the gravity of the nest knowing the wrens inside can fly. The ode is limited to its chilling beauty. The sublime…
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The Other Blessing Before the Curse
Before audaciously flying in the strangled gleaming of the last glory of extinct clouds rising I asked my soul what is the purpose of having the last thought of mankind or any dreams Oh Jinn give back the last of me stolen and not yours The Jinn replied they blessed you don’t you remember…
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Do Not Silence My Words That You Hear
Don’t take away my words by not repeating my poems inside. My poetry is revolutionary as a floating feather. Close your eyes and catch it knowing the vision is in its flight and not where it falls. Pick it up from the floor and it becomes a Cobra spitting, aiming to poison you.
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A Very Shaggy Wake
Outside of town a man died naked beneath a nice tree. Some said he was old and that the tree was an elm. Some said he was young and that it was an oak. Others, that he was a child and that it was a magnolia. The only thing they agreed on: that…
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For You, the Unnecessary Dead of the American Dream
You were unburied 10 years before I was born, pulled from the Arie riverbed the day Nagasaki burned. You died like a samurai in your daughter’s arms, bowels flowing, head severed cleanly, falling to the water amidst the silence of dead human trees with their bark skin turned inside out, among the screams of the…
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Everything
Everything’s broken, diseased, sold and resold. The pandemic’s breath blows on us. Everything’s is devoured in a hunger never filled. So why do I see a glistening in the distance? In the day dream, a forest appears on the border. The scent of lavender and lilies exhales out. In the nightmare, the zodiac…
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Seeing Jaws Again
Her name you may or may not recall. It was Chrissie, the body in the sand dune. You do remember the shark, the blood on the water, death spreading like a virus in the town of Amity. You do remember that the beaches should have been closed but Amity was a summer town…
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A Prayer on Walking a Small Part of the Trail of Tears
What is the land but dust but mountains but forrest but mud but lost sorrow What is sorrow but torn soul but wounded skin but a trail of tears. This day the Chickasaw Choctaw Creek Seminole Cherokee wipe the white mans dirt off their right foot with their left foot wipe…
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Messing With the Sky
The light was so bad I made some clouds— little cotton balls taped to helium balloons drifting up to the heavens. The first were the standard balloon animals: dogs, sheep, horses, giraffes, lions. They folded conventionally but became much more creative creatures with more cotton piled on. The orange poodle became a bison,…
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Soul Cleansing
This soul is not a drip-dry thing. It’s needs constant washing and wringing to function cleanly. It needs to tumble on high heat to wear just right. Hand wash it and it will shrink in protest. Line dry it and you might think it will smell of heaven but it is the rancid smell of…
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My Voice Should Die on Land
I am not a sailor. I am meant to die on land, ahes spread above sea level, or in a coddled urn above the hearth. My voice is paper and where I choose to exist, a white world that is not sky— this voice of mine. I have no ensign. My heart beats soft, beautiful…
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Still Life
It’s in the shading. It’s the way the light is written. It’s the way the observer takes it all in. It’s the way it convinces one that the world will last. It’s the way it plants a seed in the mind, the way it touches one inside, lives inside the streets of memory, inhabits…
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The Killer Poem
Poetry can kill you when you shut yourself inside of it. It doesn’t want you looking for better words in other poems. It wants to cage you to the corners of a sheet of paper. It doesn’t want you to breathe the thing it won’t allow. It wants you to use…
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A Helping Hand
The seed planted with our small help becomes a crop. The flame carefully kindled by us ignites civilization. Now we must weed our blighted hearts to feed the moral fire of our hungry minds.
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Wings
Man has a map of the galaxy for his body, a map of his genes that are his universe. He has a defense or attack for every chess move housed in Watson’s memory. But precious of all, he has the ability to grow crops, to put water in the hands of the thirsty, to make…
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The Last Piece of Cake
There once was a race of cake men equally divided between birthday and wedding types, each born into whatever flavor was selling that day— usually chocolate or vanilla, but towards the end Neapolitan- whose faith was strong. They succumbed to the next door country of cake eaters, who reveled in their two week long…
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Dead Poem
What will happen when we stop writing poems? What will poetry become when we stop inspiring and the beauty of words is silenced or rejected? We will leave the writing table and descend into the valley to find new sounds and laughter. We will drink the last water from thirsty mountains. …
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Eating Sky With Henny Penny
When the giant bagel fell from the sky everyone complained when it blocked the road. Even when children cut it into pieces and passed it out, lathered with shmear and lox the town folks refused to eat the manna. A host of angels descended to clean up the mess. The town folks rushed to the…
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Soul Tailoring
I asked the haberdasher to make me a new soul. something inexpensive and lighter than 21 grams with a loose fit. He made it, draped me in it then disappeared. I went home and hung it in the closet . The next day I couldn’t figure out how to put it on. So,…
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Open the Door
I am scared, mommy like I was in the summer storm many months ago. I tremble in my feet and hands as I was in the deep puddle, eyes open, screaming, shaking, mommy, dark words want to come off my tongue. Mommy, I am shaking as I come down the stairs, light as a ghost.…