Posts for June 5, 2025 (page 11)

               nail polish pretty
     though gardeners always know
               only paint the toes

                               waters

of annihilation

the body

                        a sheet of glass

        turns to wax                            hardens

        to tallow    

                    the sheath of a knife

                                                            the inevitable

catastrope

        across leagues                    of snow                    and                    desert

                                    those great wars

this monster 

the body

On Illness, Virginia Woolf

Fourth grade,
gifted program,
the teacher taught us how
to write cinquains for Mother’s Day.
Here mom.  

Cinquain,
a crappy form,
copyright Adelaide Crapsey.
For real that was her name, Crapsey.  

Ripoff,
American
faux haiku, syllabic—
two four six eight two syllables
cinquain.  

It’s lost,
the staplebound
chapbook the teacher made
of cinquains, my long gone first poem,
mother  

of mine,
but I remember
that I used the word old
to describe my thirty-one year
old mom.  

Mother
loving caring
has a job so she can’t
be part of the carpool, nice, old
mother.  

Something
like that, not true
and crap as poetry,
but at nine old was no insult,
mother.  

I showed
her my first poem
and looked up expectant
and she ripped the towel rack down
angry,  

hollered
I guess, to you
I’m nothing but an old
mother. I was just nine years old,
mother.  

My poem
wasn’t true. She
wasn’t caring, loving,
nice. I’ve looked everywhere for the
right words.  

My tears
are unmanly
but part of me’s still nine
and confused. Well, now we’re both old,
Mother.

Bone-tired dreams.
Fallen union.
Here are the results:
Unemployment.
Housing, jobs
cut.
Business is Number One.
America is
(better than?)
this.

An erasure from President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union Address
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/28/president-barack-obamas-state-union-address

Pastel chalk dust and dark chocolate coat my unshaven legs. I plant my bare feet into the grass, teeming with dandelions and clover. A few yards to my right there is a line seperating my building and the one next door. Their lawn is freshly mowed, blades erect as soldiers, uniform in height. I like my grass wild. I like to feel the dirt on the brave soles of my feet. 

I want to practice this more: declaring what I like and meaning it. Slowly paring things down until what I like is all that I see.

What interests me
is natural intelligence,
walking around smarts–
what got the early Polynesians
across thousands of miles
in a small boat.
I see them standing tall,
eyes on the horizon.
They learned to read the sky,
the winds,
even the birds that appeared.
The humidty they could feel
on their faces.

A prison within a prison
Held by mountains
Made of concrete
Held by metal bars cool
As creek water
Meals of water and bread
No TV, no radio
No personal items save
A Bible      
                Yea though you walk through
                this valley of shadows
Don’t get rowdy
The guards will take
Your mattress, your clothes
Chain you to the bars
Shoot you with tear gas

Dip the water out
Of the toilet
Talk through the pipes
Keep close company
With the voices in your head
You’ll hear the songs
Your mama never sang
You’ll hear the warden holler
To the guard in the tower
                Lower the key      
                He’s going home.

No one knew the source of the claw-footed bathtub
the fraternity used on their May Day float,
but one brother produced a blonde wig and an enormous brassiere.
He earned the honor of riding in the tub while brothers
poured bubbly ginger ale over him as the float
wandered down Limestone in supposed stupor.
Musically inclined members dressed in black tie
played trombone, alto sax, and clarinet —
they swung to jazz tunes.  

Of course, they won first prize.              

I cracked it open
with both hands
hot shell, sweet steam,
juice slipping down my wrist.

You just stared,
didn’t even pretend
not to.

I tugged the meat out slow,
all in one long piece
soft, warm.

I dipped it in butter
so golden it looked sinful
and took a bite.

You exhaled
like that was the first breath
you’d taken all night.

The table was quiet
except for the sound
of my fingers
working through armor
to get to the good stuff.

You looked at me
like you knew
exactly how this was going to end
and maybe
you weren’t wrong.

Korean food with a melon-flavored milk
a sip from a mug with a bulldog on it
a purple, velvet wizard hat fluffed up again
lavendar tissue paper
three squirrels and a chipmunk
(cardinals and monarch butterflies always count)
an oathing stone with a Celtic engraving
Queen Anne’s lace
lemon bars in another form
pralines and bubbles
Alan Rickman’s voice and the sound of a cello crying
zen pencils and Frida Kahlo quotes
a kiwi bird brass figurine or the YouTube video “Nuggets”
a lightbulb filled with dried rose petals
Frasier Crane’s laughter
a tree trunk doubling as a coffee table
the Ale-8-One squirrel
a cerulean crayon and thinking of the Dandelion Crayon Girl

Have they appeared in your world too?

repetition is no miracle,
but the flow of light that comes in when you know you’re not alone
and the pulse it sends out when you notice how it breathes into your cells
that’s the magic of synchronicity
that’s our fungal network having fun and how the world’s spun
and when synchronicity calls, I hope you answer with pause
repetition is no miracle,
and then again, again it is