Posts for June 19, 2022 (page 4)

The evergreen trees are verdant,
the deciduous ones – orange and red.
I’m dressed inappropriately.
Sometimes I catch up with you,
we exchange insignificant phrases about the work at hand.
I’m smarter than usual when talking with you.
Your cheeks continue to hollow out,
your pantlegs flap in the wind.
I lift my arm to point
in the direction of your disappearance,
and helplessly withdraw it back.

I feel you closer than ever,
and I don’t feel like talking at all.

Author: Marin Bodakov
Translator: Katerina Stoykova

In between sunken ships and
houses burnt to the ground
I cry for Jimi Hendrix
and my mother in
alternating gasps
Loss is loss

I want to tell You I am sorry
On Your last Sunday, 
You chopped onions carrots celery enough
To last and
Hung a shelf in the bathroom and
Replaced hooks in the kitchen that we’d been making do
For years

I was supposed to be the one who made Plans and 
wiped clean the Slate of 
last week’s livings

Every Sunday
Your materials and my machinations made a mundane magic
Out of living

I wasn’t prepared for no more Sundays, and the vegetables,
they went rotten in the fridge.
I looked at them for days, gutted, begging them to give me

One. Last. Chance. 

to be saved.

these chimes
sound
in gentle wind

fierce with
funereal memory

Ruffles on the dress
cover the truth in linen.
Beneath there are holes.

He was a farm boy
Eighth grade education
polio victim, one leg shorter
F4 for World War
product of German immigrants’
second generation

Not a gambler or a smoker
confirmed teetotaler
Never played a note of music
never owned a gun
or fishing rod
read the paper every day

Pet walker, shrub trimmer
a genius Mister Fixit
anything with mechanical parts
A master with a movie camera

He could take a splinter
from my finger
Mercurochrome my knee scrape
in the quickest painless way

With his golden mellow voice
he read my bedtime story
like James Earl Jones
But most of all I loved
to hear him sing like Bing*

*Bing Crosby

-Sue Neufarth Howard

trunk split low, contorted, crusted
with furry blue-green lichens sprouting  

powdery gray multi-petaled blooms.
The tree’s crown a riot of 7-lobed  

scarlet leaves—licks of flame, fallen stars,
spread fingers. When I align my hand  

against a leaf, the foliage sparks, morphs
into hands. Open human hands of passed   

loved ones—parents, husbands, friends,
ancestors further & further back in time—

history unfolding.     

~ Inspired by Kyosuke Tchinaï’s Maple, Autumn’s Ornaments

James wears a dark tee shirt
and with a long-woven scarf
tied around his neck, he looks
like a Frenchman,  head shaved,
a heavy beard neatly sheared.
I imagine the harsh beginning
each day of a soaped scraped
face.  And though his skin
is festooned with tattoos,
he looks scrubbed clean
from the shower.  Mala beads
encircle his wrist and speak
of a deep well to draw from.
He would fit well in an Italian
Renaissance painting done
in dark heavy oils.  And
in the background rich warm colors
glow with light.