Posts for June 22, 2016

Category
Poem

Evening Music

We meet someone. Maybe. Like them, or we don’t. We fall in love, or not. Stay happily together until death et cetera, or maybe not so much. It’s all sequential, linear, a perfect decision tree. It’s evening, I’m revising some poems displayed on the screen, and Ella’s singing. And there’s no straight line from here to there about it. The lyrics and their moods are all over the place, all jumbled up and sideways and what the hell is coming next. Just like every relationship and every day I can recall from the last seven decades. If it all went by the script, I think it would worry me more. 


Amanda Corbin
Category
Poem

Donald Trump Makes Twitter Great Again, a found poem

Make
a disaster
in
honesty & judgement

drive down
will
obviously
a
failed
reaction under pressure

an empty room
he choked like a dog

today
I love you

tomorrow
more attacks will follow

they are desperate
people
lined up
to pray

meeting with the NRA
more people that will threaten
the total distortion
we will be in

sad case
if they thought
we
will be
safe
again


Erin Mathews
Category
Poem

Shared Souvenirs From A Wedding

-a cut on my leg, from the door of the portable bathroom with faux granite walls
-a bug bite on my hairline
-a tiny scab on my chin

-a smaller cut on my leg in the same spot from who knows what
-a scab on the back of my neck
-purple glitter toenails

-photobooth pictures that I’m not in
-a flower crown in my fridge

-twenty-five small bobby pins
-a sticky spot from leftover hairspray that won’t quit
-three commemorative glasses 

-the ghost of a sparkler burn, in my palm, under my heel


K. Nicole Wilson
Category
Poem

Flat Lines (For 49 Fireflies)

A single melody can feed five thousand,
thirst is quenched with sweet showers of rhythm,
but too often there’s a catch,
like how little boys will dance
until adults say It’s wrong,
and a pulse is stopped. 

Still. Another pulse is stopped.
Like in the suicides of thousands,
some who never held hands because it was wrong,
some who never sang in a lover’s ear to swells of rhythm,
the melodic waves that pull bodies to dance
aren’t life preservers everyone gets a chance to catch. 

Like how little girls will play catch,
until a pulse is stopped.
Until some man says she should only dance,
but only with half of thousands
—and without picking the rhythm—
because twirling with girls is wrong. 

Why do only some get to choose whose love is wrong?
And now there’s so many fireflies we’ll never catch,
all moving in the night music, trapped in the rhythm,
the rhythm of staccato drops, so many pulses stopped.
Forty-nine multiplied by thousands:
so many steps left in the dance, 

still. Even in silence we must dance,
and make new love, and new music when the radio’s wrong,
we must join our voices with thousands.
Alone there’s too many tears to catch,
too many pulses stopped
before the end of their intended rhythms.

So many feet dead to the rhythm.
All they wanted to do was dance,
so many pulses stopped.
There is so much wrong. So much wrong.
Grief is a bitter bug to catch,
each day passing like a thousand,

but a single rhythm can heal five thousand.
So take my hand and we’ll dance, and find rainbows to catch,
and honor each pulse that’s stopped wrong.


Category
Poem

Red Herring

Are your ashes in the sky?
Or did you dissolve in the ground?
Are your molecules in the clouds?
Am I being too loud
Or vulgar
When I talk about the existence of our disappearance?

Are you in the whites of my eyes
Or the rights of my lies
When I try to please you
When these talks make you mad?
Where psychiatrics and materials
Are two things I can’t compromise.

It’s sad,
I’m getting old,
Life stays the same.
It’s quite more serious
Than when you think it’s a game:
The disappearance of our existence.


Category
Poem

From My Deck

Breeze stirs evergreens
Black ears perk up at bird song
Charring burgers tease
Blooms tilt to meet last sun rays
Feet up work gloves discarded


Category
Poem

Rubbernecking

On the porch, sipping our coffee, we enjoy the first moments
of the day. A loud siren interrupts us.
Two fire engines park in front of our neighbor’s house.

Another neighbor stands in his driveway, watching.
As we finish our coffee, we wait to see what happens.
Another neighbor is spraying weed killer.
“She has health problems,” he tells a passerby,
adding, “Cool old lady.”

She appeared in good health days ago
when we stopped by with flowers from the farmers market.
She told us the local tomatoes will be ripe in three weeks,
to buy them from the first farmer on the left.

We waited until the EMS took her out on a stretcher.
Did they read the note on her door
about the care of her dog and cat?
Last time her sister never put out fresh water.

We return to our houses. Places to go, things to do.


Category
Poem

Color-Coded Ibis

                                             Color-Coded Ibis

Uniform white as they graze
except for orange beaks
and orange stems
for legs.

You can only see the tips of black
on the wings of ibis
when they glide
in to land.


Category
Poem

Synchronized

like clockwork, the orange
mackerel tabby leaps on the bed,
walks on my head, and I know
it is six a.m., sure as if she’d been
wound and set the night before


Category
Poem

Blueprints (Procrasturbation)

Abstract Emotional Noun.
Physical gerund-time adjective-adverb. (choose metaphor/vocabulary) Symbol/Metaphor in image/vocabulary-
Contemplate Navel Lint.
Universal application.
Turn.