Posts for June 8, 2015

Category
Poem

To the god of the Black Flame

Sitting on their thrones,
the pantheon forged in flame.
Will & thought ensued;
my prototype heart iron-made.
Bronze form but pumping red blood.


Amanda Corbin
Category
Poem

A Rose

After Mary Oliver’s “The Bleeding-heart”
 
There is a rose bush beside my grandmother’s dining room window that reaches up to the gutter. Its branches—thick as Crayola markers—are tied back because they can no longer hold their own weight. When it blooms it’s a gentle pink, like a baby’s blanket. That rose bush has been there since before I was born (more than thirty years) and as long as anyone can remember. Like so many family stories, I don’t know exactly where this one begins. Families, have you noticed, lack a certain simplicity. More fitting, anyway, is to think about where stems from that bush have taken root: my house, my cousin’s, my mother’s. I don’t know yet if mine is going to make it. But if it does, every summer, in all those different places, the same rose—pale pink as love itself—will open in a perfect sphere of tissue soft petals. You could say she was not a simple woman. Though she knew how to grow roses, that much is true. And never, in my whole life, would I have wished to be her.

Rona Roberts
Category
Poem

All the Diffidence

The way it seemed it might be
Is not the way it is.

No poems rhyme or tap dance
Without a thought from me.

They hide behind my book stack
Or in my winter coat

Too shy, in spite of coaxing,
To have their quiet say.


Jennifer Barricklow
Category
Poem

Draw a map of the world

as it appears inside
the back of your skull
lines of sight that project
through your eyes

tattoo continents and oceans
with inky residue of blasted
dreams so you will not
be able to forget

the way home


Lennart Lundh
Category
Poem

Vocabulary Lesson

Here. She pointed.
Touched my lips, her collarbone,
again my lips.

The clavicle,
from Latin: clavicula,
“little key.” 

The key to?
She touched her sternum,
said, make no bones.

 


Mary Allen
Category
Poem

On a Profusion of Poems

Each
day
in June
when verses
flow from poets’ pens,
and come to grace the Accents’ page,
we celebrate community
with gratitude to
LexPoMo.
Each day
this
June.

— Mary L Allen


Category
Poem

the long distance.

you imagine having a casual conversation

maybe he is watching 
some show
you are looking 
at clearance items online

he laughs at jokes
you always manage
to just miss
he quickly glances
at the computer screen
when you point out 
something you like

you imagine a whole conversation
without 
i miss you
i wish you were here
i wish i could touch you
i want you
oh, what i would do to you if you were just here …

and you think 
you will keep this distance
just a bit longer


Gaby Bedetti
Category
Poem

Rehearsal

You can’t play the trombone while you’re holding a baby,
the choir director says, as he reaches for the child with his magic hands,

hands that lead us through the songs
in four-part harmony but with one voice.

We sing until the tunes put forth roots–
more trumpet-like here, more vocal character there.

We think tall vowels, line up the sounds, shape the stopping points
until the music becomes the living liturgy

articulating the pain and suffering of Christ. Singing liberates us.
After the last hymn, we float out of the cathedral doors.


K. Nicole Wilson
Category
Poem

First Lamentation

“How like a window she has become…
she that was a princess.” (Lamentations 1:1)

Now I only see through her
to what is behind,
after reading lines of other hearts aligned
and beating in bed beside her,
undulating like tides inside her,
she’s no longer a royal vision,
and almost faceless,
save for two pools of blue ice
that reflect nothing
but my inevitable inadequacy.


Carole Johnston
Category
Poem

eight

some say
Midnight Butterfly is just
a metaphor
muse in an old photograph
your smokey absinthe dreams