A shout-out
to all those plants growing up through concrete.
You’re not weeds;
you’re survivors.
You’re recyclers,
taking back stone to earth
and ugly to beautiful
and man to nature.
Keep on growing, friends.
Keep on stretching out,
inching up,
notching roots through cracks
and blooming up into the sun.
You’re small but mighty
and you’re not a weed.
You’re life.
We never found it crazed this blessing
of garlic between us this need to dip flowers
of broccoli, ruffled radicchio into hot baths
of cream, fleshy smashed garlic, musky
anchovies. Never odd
to let this nectar drip and soften
sliced warm baguette soak
its yeast that grew in us. We weren’t insane
loving the fullness in our mouths, the smell
on our clothes, this richness pulsing
through our blood bleeding
to the surface of us. Garlic
was the sticky white magic
that held us together
on the coldest February nights.
Poem 20, June 20
Chester Johnson, Poem Twelve
You have to remember that it’s been
74 years now since I went to sea.
My pay grade was E4,
Petty Officer Third Class at the signing.
When I got my patch,
it was tacked on my sleeve;
the eagle was called a crow.
I was punched half a dozen times,
hearty punches that bruised my arm.
I was lucky no one
tacked me with that needle.
I was as happy as I could be, however,
for I had achieved
the lowest grade of noncommissioned officer
for my achievements,
and my crow never flew away.
she used to set
the minute hand ahead just enough
to keep her on time when she ran late
now she turns
her face to the wall, covered by both hands
to hide how much time has passed
For a spell in my youth I acted independently on the notion
that I only had a certain allotment of words in my life.
So I chose my words carefully and spoke little.
I didn’t want to run out.
Yet when my spouse first said he loved me,
I was silent.
And when my parents were dying,
I had no words.
Recently, on the way down Springer Mountain,
hanging on a branch at a crossroads of the trail,
I saw a single clog, with a note inside: “Sorry!”
If I know what I believe and walk the talk,
there should be no cause for regret.
My conscience would be free and easy.
And yet after all these years
I still listen to Dr. Hook and the Medecine Show
singing Shel Silverstein’s “The Things I Didn’t Say.”
I will scrape my stiletto heels across the hot skin of your heart.
I will tear you apart with my words,
My curves with eat away at your nervous system
with a hypnotic rhythm I will move you
The fact that these teeth are coming in,
Isn’t a sin.
Biting back words I’ve held within my stomach,
Turning, bulging with an acidic bubble. I was deemed trouble
from the womb.
So give me some
Elbow room while I explain to you
I am not the discarded fragment contrived from the rib of Adam.
My mouth may touch the outskirts of lust
but I am hungry for more than your orchard.
And we eat and we eat from these forbidden forms,
words twisted, but when mixed it shape the outlining of my thought and form.
Spun from the mouth and pattern of those before,
molded of some fire,
molten desire to dispel misconceptions
we live to relearn.
Our actions echo the past of women overseas forced knee to knee
with blood dripping from wounds underneath.
Virginity is the sweetest when it’s with a fee.
So we call it Genital Mutilation with our Western Drawl,
like we’ve seen it all,
After all, we got the same shit happening in L.A. malls.
Surgeons tucking our nips, tits, clits and labia’s,
Tattooed make up marks, in the hopes at the most we will replicate
some fake porn star.
Majestic
with our nerve damage and vulva scars,
the lack that we implant may lead to heart attack,
but the results are best by far.
We are training our daughter’s bodies to burn,
the fat, the past, and any desire resting underneath blistered words.
We are hollow, yearning, at the center of a core
that’s been purged, cleared out into this concave shell
of repentance and discomfiture of womanly urge.
The war on women’s bodies has blistered all but the teeth that clutch
against anguish of a secondary worth.
So don’t tell me to wait my turn, hold my cry,
and close my eyes while your sin is done.
Tell me your God favored Adam over Eve’s serpent tongue,
I’ll tell you a woman is only measured by the amount of apples she can earn.
I will scrape my stiletto heels across the hot skin of your heart.
I will tear you apart with my words,
My curves with eat away at your nervous system
with a hypnotic rhythm I will move you
The fact that these teeth are coming in,
Isn’t a sin.
Biting back words I’ve held within my stomach,
Turning, bulging with an acidic bubble. I was deemed trouble
from the womb.
So give me some
Elbow room while I explain to you
I am not the discarded fragment contrived from the rib of Adam.
My mouth may touch the outskirts of lust
but I am hungry for more than your orchard.
And we eat and we eat from these forbidden forms,
words twisted, but when mixed it shape the outlining of my thought and form.
Spun from the mouth and pattern of those before,
molded of some fire,
molten desire to dispel misconceptions
we live to relearn.
Our actions echo the past of women overseas forced knee to knee
with blood dripping from wounds underneath.
Virginity is the sweetest when it’s with a fee.
So we call it Genital Mutilation with our Western Drawl,
like we’ve seen it all,
After all, we got the same shit happening in L.A. malls.
Surgeons tucking our nips, tits, clits and labia’s,
Tattooed make up marks, in the hopes at the most we will replicate
some fake porn star.
Majestic
with our nerve damage and vulva scars,
the lack that we implant may lead to heart attack,
but the results are best by far.
We are training our daughter’s bodies to burn,
the fat, the past, and any desire resting underneath blistered words.
We are hollow, yearning, at the center of a core
that’s been purged, cleared out into this concave shell
of repentance and discomfiture of womanly urge.
The war on women’s bodies has blistered all but the teeth that clutch
against anguish of a secondary worth.
So don’t tell me to wait my turn, hold my cry,
and close my eyes while your sin is done.
Tell me your God favored Adam over Eve’s serpent tongue,
I’ll tell you a woman is only measured by the amount of apples she can earn.
This used to be prairie and woods, then farm fields. Now it’s a suburb, though that’s just a word that means “looks exactly like urban to me.” There’s a cost to this, prices to pay for surveying and surviving the gray horizons. In exchange for the not-arduous task of letting dandelions grow in the back yard, I get brilliant honeybees and loud, big as a thumb joint bumblebees. The dancing monarchs and swallowtails that brighten the front like sunbeams cost maybe twenty bucks of butterfly weed and bush at the nursery, some fresh dirt, and brief daily waterings. Oh, and I got my hands dirty and my heart clean, like being a child again, or at prayer. But the biggest return on investment, if you just have to quantify, is four cups of seed a day bringing me finches and sparrows, robins and grackles, red wings and mourning dove couples, all singing with wondrous and varied voices.
Defintions
I had to read it in a poem
to know the truth of this.
The person I thought of as a friend
is merely an acquaintance
so all my frustrations of her not acting
as a friend were for naught.
What other truths are sitting
in front of me
unrecognized?
