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Posts for June 14, 2025 (page 8)

Registration photo of Winter Dawn Burns for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Winter Dawn Burns
Category
Poem
3
6/14/25

In the Shadows of a Little Boy

In the Shadows of a Little Boy:

 
Meandering through the dew-covered grasses at dawn, the slow bake of sweet magnolia surrounds me.
A bewitching brew of memory covers me like a million burning moons. I think of our first kiss over a quarter century ago and my breath becomes hitched to my pause on this thought. I rejoice in knowing that our kisses are just souvenirs of the love we share daily. We are getting older. Our grandson is growing. We are focused on his future. But, how could we have known that while we are living and loving, there’s a whole world dreaming of blinded hydrangeas and a Nuclear Winter of doom?
 
©️Winter Dawn Burns 
Sylvia Ahrens
Category
Poem
8
6/14/25

Sometimes, A Thug

is just a thug

                                            (On this day of protest and resistence,
                                              rise up like a river!)

Registration photo of Bethany Robinson for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Bethany Robinson
Category
Poem
1
6/14/25

In the pursuit of understanding

I have become disconnected with my body

With my sense of self

In the pursuit of understanding

Why

Others

Are the way that they are

Registration photo of Austen Reilley for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Austen Reilley
Category
Poem
8
6/14/25

Queer Literary Hoedown at the Carnegie Center

I went to a hoedown
on Friday the 13th
two days post- Strawberry Moon

I witnessed a throwdown
of power from truth
in poems full of spiritual swoon

I watched good love glow down
the grand marble steps 
to the streets (may it last beyond June).

 

Registration photo of Keez for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Keez
Category
Poem
4
6/14/25

Millennial Tech Timeline

Neanderthal to
Digital to
Virtual to
Artificial…
will it be,
Consequential?

Registration photo of S. Murrey for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
S. Murrey
Category
Poem
2
6/14/25

What If

I am in my middle school apartment–otherwise known as the upstairs of my family home

I am in my dreams, probably the very deep sleep that only teens can achieve on a Saturday morning.

Annoyed at the thumping on my door– irritated to half wakefulness

I stumble and stomp to the door–full of 13 year old disdain

But then

 

Chubby fingers in flannel sleeves reach out for me with delight

Innocent eyes round with surprise as the open door and her stability swing away

Panicked adrenaline shoves me forward grasping for her hand 

 

I missed

 

Her toddler body teeters back on the top stair

What if I hadn’t caught her shirt?

What if I hadn’t pulled her to me?

What if the relief I felt as she lived 

Never happened?

What if?

I hug her close.

Registration photo of Meepow for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Meepow
Category
Poem
1
6/14/25

Opposites Detract

The opposite is what you get she said,

As she stood there by the door.

There are donuts in the love seat,

There is a ballet in the corridor,

There are beignets on the wall,

There is hair strewn on the floor.

It reminds me of a slaughter,

Somewhere I’ve seen before.

A place forgotten to the sound,

The sound of laughter and of joy,

Cause no one is around,

At least not anymore.

And if by chance you see it,

Don’t think on it all that hard.

There are white pills in the bedroom,

Construction in the yard.

There used to be lifeblood here,

But it was more than I could take.

I took a loan out on the ugliness,

And tried to drown deep in the lake.

She stabbed me with a kitchen knife,

In a place I used to feel.

Now it’s just a gaping hole,

That no longer yearns to heal.

At the moment rhyme and reason are locked together at the horns.

I never swore that I’d give up,

But how I tire of the thorns.

If I obsess then I might make sense,

Or then again make more,

More ways to confuse the reason,

That I’m still standing at your door.

 

You never stop

I never stop

Keep spinning

Keep turning

Love on

Love off

Love on

We are getting old

This is getting old

 

 

 

The end

Registration photo of Goldie for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Goldie
Category
Poem
2
6/14/25

Ode to a golden duck head umbrella that bloomed with the grace of bats cast out of a cave to alight on a total eclipse

While I don’t endorse this 
opinion, it lolled like this, 
and who am I to just awkwardly alter it:
 
a musculature 
of osier creeping up 
over the kinked and dis-
tending pipe dream, fumaroles
choking on funnier things than
flags you think you’ll stake before you’re
baked back into the bone-picked clay—I’d 
 
rather just marvel
at how my umbrella grown
gingko gold bursts forth with the
verve of Rachmaninoff beat upon
buckets and slingshots; how
 
my whole body refuses to prune
in a rainstorm—how I make cracks
                                  about just how 
                                  hard it seems to
                                  hopscotch over the
    lilypad conibear cereal maze called
working a deadend job for fear of just
feeling like maybe those deathbed con-
   fessions might dare outlast the arrest-
   ing madlib eulogies marking my dry   
   disembarkment—how I could fold 
 
and enclose in a 
kudzu’d glove 
compartment
all of these
things 
these
prune-squishy mittens’ve 
                made or minced,
 
all the vegetables split,
all the words scribbled over,
like stickers suggesting an end to acne—
 
was it all just too tacky or shitty to cling
upon anything other than pity? The world
 
we commonly frame as a smoldering
dumpster now, the blue-ribbon cow
found fielding the world with shit
swoln over its stall-studded shanks, this 
Know-Nothing Party manqué sort-of 
enfant terrible who’s siphoning 
how many years worth of medicaid 
just for a bean feast spangled with 
lethal machinery, all of those 
blossoming burn marks scouring what 
was an almost virginal old Manitoba, all
of the soles misplaced with malice or simply
shuffled like waterlogged Monty cards among 
fish-gutted, mussel-eyed, slavering tyrannies—
all of this ushering under the clouds now, yet, 
 
I’d more rather marvel
at how my umbrella grown
gingko gold bursts forth with the
verve of Rachmaninoff beat upon
buckets and slingshots—maybe
 
that makes me the glib village idiot.
 
The glib village idiot’s burial’s 
borne beneath bright yellow 
Tonka trucks and rain and sparklers. All
 
that I ask is that somebody hold 
my umbrella up over my swollen plot
that seemed, perhaps, too apt a metaphor,
 
arguing anyone’s left who can tenderly
dandle its odin-eyed duck head, braced a-
gainst all those winds that Dylan kept tangling 
 
up into little blue bilious hymns.
 
 
Registration photo of Tom Hunley for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Tom Hunley
Category
Poem
5
6/14/25

Elegy

        Now that the sun has abandoned you along with this world and the other stars, it’s time to empty your backpack of all the tools you learned to use to forge a life you could live with. Now you have nothing left, no money, no keys, only your curiosity about what you could never know at all. Your passions and your discoveries have not succeeded in putting you on any paved road. Now you are nothing but the disease that has come for you and overcome you, nothing but a dream that dreams of itself, nothing but love, disembodied and throwing itself into nothingness in all directions. Now you are only the distance between what you were and what you wanted, and yet you leave traces of your memories and hopes, your yearning and fears, as the rest of us go on, sweating and spitting at the great gaping nothingness closing in on us.

Registration photo of N. D for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
N. D
Category
Poem
1
6/14/25

Fade

if absence makes the heart grow fonder

i fear i am destined to love you

until the end of this life

and well into the next

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