Posts for June 15, 2025 (page 8)

Registration photo of Danielle Valenilla ∞ for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

No Rest for the Awake

Freddy Krueger is without a doubt the scariest 1980’s horror villain
To think you might fight for your basic needs and that’s where the danger lies
when you’re most vulnerable, most fatigued,
your subconscious replaying and reprocessing
suturing the wounds of your vast schema‌
I tell myself that insomnia is a gift
It protects me from such Boogiemen
and slows time down to something bite-size,
but my legs are restless, my body tossing and turning,
and time is taunting from the vacant glow of a digital clock‌
I’m noticing for the first time that you can inadvertently memorize
white noise albums if the tracks replay enough
You can accidentally on purpose know the thunder of your storm
and predict the lightning crashes as you wait for rainbows
and squiggly confetti to cross the back of your eyelids
Sensory self-awareness is brutal like that,
the way a familiarity can feel like a focus or
the way the unknown feels like a quest you have to fulfill‌
There is no sensory rest, not awake, not asleep,
nor in the travel between celestial sheets
Freddy understands how many ways we say: Rest Without Peace
It’s called being alive,
and the nightmare is relentless


Category
Poem

Proof

I didn’t mean to miss you this morning; so I’m sitting with your writings
and thinking of the time you said when you look at me you see a can

of worms. An old friend sprinting through snow or dragged coughing
out of a lake. Common ground, towels draped over the car to dry.

We laid in the impossible third floor heat below skylight.
We worked things out in twenty laps around the college track.

I waited outside until the end of the meeting, trying not to itch
a poison oak rash. Most things are temporary, such as the desire

to be a giraffe or heat-proof glass or to prove you aren’t all the things
you have been. When you asked I said it’s like an injury you can’t

localize or tell if it’s already started to bleed. I never meant this
badly, more to say I read your birthday note waiting for a cashier

in a Virginia gas station, signed with love always and remembered
how I wrote my first love poem after we took a wrong turn

at a stop sign, stilled and staring at twelve deer
feeding at the tree line, paused to stare back at us.


Category
Poem

< OLDER POSTS

The fence in the back forty is fallen,
badly in need of repair–
the older posts are rotten,
the newer ones stripped bare

the barbed wire is rusty,
broken in places, I swear–
nothing to keep the cattle contained,
or coyotes out of there

boss man ain’t noticed it yet–
I know he’ll be mad as hell–
and I’m the man he’ll yell at,
maybe lay me off a spell

but now I gotta tell him,
ride out, and show him the posts–
praying he will understand
even fences give up the ghost


Registration photo of Sophie Watson for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

Harm’s Way

The deer prepare themselves to run
with that cold fire, the chemical rush,
lightning white, adrenaline sparking.
The same adrenaline spiders through
your blue wrists. But you feel so invincible.
You bloom on the highway, moonflower,
trailing your scent. You could never die.
You could never be those bones strung up
drying in the wind, scraped of any soul.
You could grin like this forever. You could
almost taste the infinite. All this life hums
to spill. Uncanny and a little mesmerized,
you could stop a bullet. You really could.


Registration photo of D. Dietz for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

Regret

Yesterday I was so busy
doing absolutely nothing 
on our first day of vacation
that I forgot to write my poem


Registration photo of Linda Meg Frith for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

Shadows on the Wall

What haunts me
is the impossible
silence of nightfall,
the emptiness of falling rain,
the wide yet imperceptible
break in the fabric of our country,
all the unicorns gathering
in one place
and leaving us
to our own devices.
What haunts me more?
The fear of being invisible or
the fear of being seen?
What haunts me
is the loss of innocence,
no hope for a brighter day,
the doom, the gloom,
the sonic boom of violence
that invades our days.
As children tell their parents
it’s too late to make it right
as poppies growing in the field
give the sweet scent
of surrender to what comes.
What haunts me
is the inevitable,
the leeching of the green
from trees,
the glazing over
of a last goodbye,
what haunts me
is what lies beneath
and what we do not see.

Registration photo of S. Murrey for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

For George Ella Lyon

Where I’m from in the summertime

From running wild in the woods behind Barbara’s house making mudpies and quilt forts,

I’m from Granny Goldie fixin Papa a plate,

From Papa Bill sitting at EKU’s graduation with my sun hat protecting his bald spot,

I’m from sweet tea Sunday dinner at Gaga’s, Dad with his own plate of potatoes, 

I’m from Gaga Sarilda hollerin’ “Will–ard” when dinner was ready,

From Papa Brewer tending his sunflowers in the sun.

I’m from Great Aunt Yvonne looking glamorous in her silky muumu and my Mucka with her big sunglasses in the floating lounger with cup holders enjoying the cool water in the 606 humidity

I’m from Mucka and Yvonne laughing till they pee– no matter where they were,

From Mucka singing gospel while Yvonne rocked Mucka’s piano with soul,

I’m from Cheri and Joy floating in the pool, tans shiny with Hawaiian Tropic,

From the water splashing over the sides as the grandkids jump around for “wall ball,”

I am from Megan and Emily and Sawyer and Dylan and Kelley being the cousins of summer always in the sun, 

From poolside cookouts with dorito salad and watermelon and fried green tomatoes,

I’m from Heather teaching me to lean into the dive into the water so far and close, 

and me teaching Henry and Willa, hands over their heads, arms pressed to their ears, leaning over until that victorious tumble. 

 


Registration photo of EDL for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

Red haired messiah

I smell poor self-esteem, 
in every word you speak.  
Is it really that hard to believe, 
you might not have the answer for everything?  

Who the fuck are you to make me doubt my own choices? 
Tell me. Who are you? Perfect and healed? 
Your unsolicited advice is that I to cling to only perfect people. 
Yet, I see you’re failing to realize they don’t truly exist. 

My brain is an atom bomb waiting to explode.  
Every word you speak, builds the tension even more. 
Please see yourself out.  

Patience is not to be wasted on false prophets. 


Registration photo of Karen George for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

When you least expected it,

                                                                                                a
deep            memory
                                                        settled
         in,

       split                  you

                       quiet.

                                                                                                You

            felt like
                                                             a      swollen          river, 

                                                                                                     a

place of real danger.

Cross                                                                                           it
                                             with                 clarity,             love,

                          in bubble wrap.

                                                         Wait                                     to

talk.

                                                     Picture

                                                            a

                      daybreak                 sky,                    purple.

         ~ An erasure of Elizabeth Strout’s novel Tell Me Everything, pgs. 126-7, including the poem’s title  


Registration photo of David Madill for the LexPoMo 2025 Writing Challenge.
Category
Poem

Reconstitution

One Hundred court stenographers,
each trained by
the same online course,
(recorded in a basement in Lincoln, Nebraska)
race to input
the full lyrics of
“Ice, Ice, Baby”
in an attempt
to crown a valedictorian.

God’s marble collection,
One Hundred of them,
spill from the vase
of plastic flowers
in which she stores them,
(God obviously being a sixty-four year old
woman with Princess Diana’s hair
as reflected in her home decor)
clatter down granite stairs,
a stampede of aggies and cat eyes.

One Hundred ordinary gray mice
learn ballet
(lacking the rhythm
necessary for tap)
and congregate on a June afternoon
to recite
on the corrugated roof
of a Little League dugout.

One particularly observant mockingbird,
hearing the three hundred,
calls back, reproducing
the sound of raindrops
wetting the shingles above
my attic bedroom.