Posts for June 13, 2025 (page 10)

Wanted: Steps for saving the seeds
of my arugula.

1
I wake up in the morning
& wish it were night, the day
yet to come. 

2
The light above the mirror 
burns out & I leave it that way,
a shadow on the glass. 

3 
It’s June but the calendar 
is still on March, the pages
too heavy to turn.

Toddlers and doddlers
exercise care
climbing stairs.  

I’m at a stage in life where I feel
like both

Read Hacker’s poem here.

Let’s just love it.
Let’s go over it like a sore gum you tongue for pleasure,
watch it strut around the room in boxers and a half-buttoned Oxford,
wearing July and unspoken things.

The poem winks and waits:
it plays the long game,
longing with form,
desiring with structure,
trysting with time.

The refrain is a striptease.
Every time it returns, it reveals a little more —
not skin, exactly, but heat —
not the body, but the gambling on the body.

And the register is genius —
casual, cocky, confessional, queer —
villanelle as game of gay chicken
where no one backs down.

Admire the discipline behind it,
the control it takes
to keep that form
from buckling,
to ride the poem’s swell
and not break until the end.

“I bet” is flirtation as speculation,
as lyric economy,
risk in the conditional.

Some poems don’t bet:
they become the table,
the chips,
the gleam on the dealer’s garter.

And you
are already sitting there,
sleeves rolled up,
speaking through poems, 
staking your life on them,
all in.

So, yes.
Let’s just love it,
until the strawberries are ripe,
until the troops get home,
until the shoulder pads come off.

an ekphrastic from a photo, Father & Son Venture Up,
by Michele LeNoir (me), 4.19.25

Your son, in tiny tan rain boots, jean shorts,
and white tee, stands halfway up wooden steps.
You, behind, against a clear blue sky, hands
at the ready. His grip tight to a rung,
his same blue eyes lit up. He grins,
his blonde head turned towards a new slide.

But he pauses, turns back toward you.
You, donned in soccer gear,
say, Go ahead, Bud, and he does—    
up four more steps!

With each step, your proud smile grows.
Your shared joy and pride and love—
and a penance for adventure—
all clearer than any day could be.

Some say the lesson
Is to make no promises you cannot keep
Or about deals that seem too good to be true
Or something convoluted about price gouging or politics.

I say the lesson
Is to be mindful of your actions
And to quickly fix mistakes that come to light
Lest the innocents and children be forced to pay the price.

(Was) Very near sighted
Now I can’t see shit up close 
But cataracts gone 

Was the inventor
of the doorknob desperate
to get in or out?

o,
sunlight
warm my bones
soothe present ache
pull me from frozen tundra’s cutting cold

the ice cracks discretely beneath my feet
follow fissures
eyes scanning
damming
heat

Be
born
that
way