Survivor
In the dark we danced until we crashed
Into each other strangers we smiled
Energy alcohol music cocaine
We shared like it was the last night
Thirty seven years later
I still carry inside
Your first gift to me
In dreams they are together, mother
Sometimes curled with a book, daughters
ask for another story and peace
slowly emerges after pain
stole the flavor at the table
where demands overshadow love.
Where is the love
the daughters keep asking mother.
Each night a delicious table
is set, loving hearts of her daughters
begin with appetites, but dessert is pain.
Everyone leaves hungry for peace.
Glistening eyes starving for peace,
no one remembers the flavor of love
when the palate is overpowered with pain.
Maybe it will take mother
choosing another place for her daughters
at a healing table.
Years later the new table
is full of flavors and peace.
For the first time the daughters
recognize the salty sweet love
sprinkled on every dish from mother.
No more bitter taste of pain.
Letting go of the past pain,
it no longer sits at the table.
Finally she lets go of her guilt, mother
seeks to find the kind of peace
that grows through patient love
and the forgiveness of daughters.
In dreams they are together, daughters
fully released from pain,
now immersed in unselfish love.
They gather at the abundant table
and hear the sweet music of peace.
They dance the heart rhythms of mother.
In dreams, mother and daughters remember pain,
shared dissonance where there was no peace,
but from pain, scarred hearts grow and the table is love.
By Kelly Waterbury
You sing my favorite song
Like you’re performing at the
Red Rocks Amphitheater
You dance in the rain,
And when everyone is watching
Even though you can’t dance
You chase after sunsets
Like they won’t happen again,
You save bugs from the pool
Even though they freak you out
You laugh at the silliest things,
You love like your life depends on it
You see the world through
Different eyes than everyone else
Honey, your body is the least interesting thing about you
Wear the damn shorts.
There are wolves
After “Corpse Pose” from Proactive Yoga by Goldie Karpel Oren
3. Let your face, jaw, tongue, and throat soften. Release any controlled breath, and begin to breathe quietly. Remain here for 3 to 10 minutes, or even longer if desired, before transitioning out of the pose.
is seven hours
once a day
too much?
First rays of summer, piercing everything like a rain of arrows.
I’m contrary today,
resisting routines and
what’s felt normal for
over a year.
Windows down
sunshine on my face,
I’m out of town
in a room of writers
masks and distance,
but in person
real life
not on a screen.
Across the room,
I see smiles in eyes
and realize,
even as an introvert,
I need to see my
people sometimes.
A cherub encoils its halberd in sparkling cat gut,
teasing the Xenian children,
a jury-rigged lyre draped across callused claws,
Le Monde de Marseilles’ mandorla like
glistening, dew-drenched jaws of too often forgotten gods
redoubled in glorying auras,
sepulchrally roaring hypnotic corruptions of Mahler,
like kittens squeeze their treacly impressions
of woebegone Meret Becker’s Na?! and Zum Diktat
in grinding their twenty-six snickering milk teeth,
batting at slumber-slowed sparrows
and the corn-colored clods
of sleep that bud about velvety eye lids;
the Xenian children
hurl an empurpling fingerling
(thrown from a trebucket,
trellising pvc enwreathed
and winched with bread ties
nicked from the Wonder Bread
bakery outlet’s dusted and
black-eyed ruins some
stone’s throw south of the
Short St. station);
it shreds in a bristling flurry
of violet confetti, screeched
through the stridulous wires
of tempered gut, still
haunted by woebegone
caterwauls cracked across
flickering, nymph-filled lamps
and prattling fence slats
slipping away to sand
and the wriggling reprimands
risen from dust disturbed—
Their sweet potato stomachs seized
and beat upon manholes’ stubborn bungs,
the corroded stints of aortas bayed,
of aortas shriveled like cigarette filters;
aortas sallow as sticky stains of Steel
Reserve curled in the screw of culvert;
these sticky feelings finnicky silence sheds,
like lapsteel’s spry and celestial depth,
svelte wires lissomely creased by a songster’s breast
but a chore-worn child’d pinched,
left grating gallant crests
down dissonant rails of twine,
a mandolin combed among maundering cheese knives;
throbbing spine of a sexton
wound around lavish italian hems,
who’d starched and straightened strident cassocks,
nestled his restive chest on a cardinal’s brim,
a vermilion condom cribbing at crackling wires,
frail, cracking spires spun
to baffle the radiant tongue of a lyrebird
splinted in gilt contempt
and some luminous self-effacement
lashed and bent in the place
of felicitous quills and a tail feather’s
fey and unplumbably thunderous grace—
What piqued zuchetto’s stem doth pick at a cardinal’s heart
or thrum the sepulchral parts (no surplice sheathes,
nor dandled and pinned upon velvety jowls
of a reliquaire’s plangently ulcerous gut)
that wind and chime among murmurous stars;
what sonorous tines sly children trill,
rimed bedside bars, the gut-encoiled halberds,
tarpons’ gills, the disquieting hours they’ve
lost amid counting out listless crafts
and masteries measureless needed,
here meted and met to but
skin a cat—
