Posts for June 30, 2025 (page 11)

Category

Poem

Charcuterie

Love the way this rolls
off my tongue promising tastes
delighting my senses
cuts of smoked sausages, fruits
brie, cheddar,Manchego, Swiss.

Gaby Bedetti

Category

Poem

6/30/25

Everything Often Feels Like an Emergency in Our World

–inspired by Elisabeth Vincentelli, “How Passengers Retooled,” NYT, June 17, 2025

Are you faced with a stressful predicament,
dangling in the air,
hanging upside down, batlike,
the consequences weighing,
catapulted up or dropped down,
no net or mat?

You have to proceed in crocodile mode
the way certain aquatic
reptiles can slow their heart rate
to preserve their energy underwater.

Prepare by rubbing resin on your body,
every place that people might catch you,
to make sure that even if there’s a little
bit of sweat, you will be sticky
and there’s less chance of a slip

though the real bond remains the one
among your team. Listen to each other.
No one is alone at the circus.

Jerry Hicks

Category

Poem

6/30/25

Monday Morning Reformation

Why is it that Monday

In the weekday is the first?

Of all the days a man can face

It has to be the worst.

Friday night we all got right

It was fun, sure, all around

Now here I lay on the first work day

And how my head does pound.

Saturday was fine you know

From first light to the end

I lived it up and was in my my cups

Visiting with friends.

The food was rich and the talk was too

As we took in the town

And it seemed like by the end of it

I hadn’t much more than laid down.

Til Sunday morn appeared right bright

And off we went again

To remove the fog with the hair o’ the dog

At breakfast with our friends.

The day ran on and so did we

Piled in a car

We headed off two counties away

To visit another bar.

The music flowed, and the spirits too

We took in all they had

Food and drink to the glasses clink

My gut is iron clad!

Now here I lay at the start of day

Knowing all I need to do

I look around as my head pounds

My stomach’s rumblin’ too.

The alarm it seems to at me scream

And the light it hurts my eyes

Outside’s a bird that can be heard

To pipe torturous lullabies.

I’m sure he’s heard about the early worm

He’s up and out of the nest

Why can’t he shut his beak and let me sleep

Oh hell! I need some rest!

“Oh well”, I say as I start my day

Tottering down the stairs

I lift the pot and the coffee’s hot

It drown’s out my cares.

Out the door I race, my day to face

With a week ahead of me

I swear my friend, “Never again!”

Just watch, you’ll see.

Goldie

Category

Poem

6/30/25

the pixies song

I like to write

un chien andalusia in

flour, though not

with the tenderer end

of a cigarette, not

with the tree-ringed

finger kinked in six-

teen tight tonsures re-

marking, in sleight-

of-hand halos, hewn from the

too many times that a kitchen

knife slipped in a hiccough or

awkward cough—relentlessly

scribbling, got me a movie around

what louring dough wad mocking

a pockmarked mug, a face, a case

for a whispering film spool’s blis-

tering ileum, what loose huckle-

nosed vessel for pestling echoes

in—awkward coughs and tree-

ringed scars condensed or

cinched in a

flickering

sentiment

seized

as what

bubbles up

over the frog-

spawn, brooding

perchance, protecting

its echoing, red as the

snickering cigarette cherry .

There’s so much

flour that just drifts

into the air, like a breath

distends or disperses, dis-

severs itself, perchance,

from the clabbering at-

mosphere so swollen

with roiling sound—and

how should an echo of

slicing up eyeballs, freed

or sealed or seized in flo-

undering flour refined to a

picket line’s lissome in-

dignance, a human chain of

dust caked over the

elbow, beckon my

heartbone sort of but

breath or air or atmosphere

much more than the sobering, truly

sobering sound of me sawing down

ground up wheat to what wry and

redounding,

resounding,

redundant,

redoubling, dead-

eyed decrees of

girlie so groovy—

Bud R

Category

Poem

6/30/25

This experience
has been such a delight—
to see the range, variety, and
impressive talent here.
Thank you all for showing up
and showing the way.
I’ve learned so much
through this process.
Hope to see you out in the world
and will look forward to reading
more of your work.

June, day after day
Poets illumined my way
Blessed soul stirrings

Quackstar

Category

Poem

6/30/25

true

You are

the most alluring kind of

disorienting:

the way the glassy surface of the lake

mirror-images the sun

until the slightest ripple

turns it to shattered light

and reveals the layered depths beneath.

You are

all the things we (girls) learn to love but fear:

the tall, athletic stride

the effortless electrifying smile

the ability to make anyone feel like

they’re the only one in the room

when your eyes meet theirs.

But somehow

these would-be weapons have always stayed safely strapped to your belt

All that you’ve ever wielded

was kindness

an earnest and sometimes self-effacing honesty

and these parts of you

can disarm more than all the others.

I realize only now

maybe you didn’t know

what you could’ve done

with just a smile.

Maybe you didn’t get the societal bullshit narratives written on the stone walls around you

Maybe you needed me to tell you

what I thought you always knew

not so you would be

that “thing” the predictable, typecast guy is

but so you would know

how breathtaking it is

that you’re not.

Karen George

Category

Poem

6/30/25

A good novel becomes part of you,

house lived in,

a
family,
a community.

The stories
still
walk,

fire,

give
rest,
a
presence

shaping my

course.

~ Erasure of p. 60 in The Delicacy & Strength of Lace, Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, edited by his daughter Anne Wright

A. Virelai

Category

Poem

6/30/25

Eurydice Tunes the Radio in the Rolls-Royce

It’s coming through like feedback
from the god-channel —
part poem, part engine-reverie.

The leather buzzes like an oracle,
headlights slicing open the veil.

Orpheus is leaking from the speaker,
moonlight’s caught in your rearview,
and the highway’s humming prophecy in 4/4 time.

You drive like you remember dying
while the music sings, “come back.”

No static. Just signal forward.

But if you’re ready —
yes, let’s turn the dial.

carole johnston

Category

Poem

6/30/25

Cacophony

It was a long slow wailing of moon that drove them mad it was a sound that only dogs could hear in their beds at night the sound would draw them out to darkness hearing the moon’s golden horns like a trumpet playing moonlight into sound poets came out of their cocoons to listen to the magic of moon in trees stars in their hair sea in their ears all the dogs in the world could not match the strange perfect harmony of the wind’s madness but they tried every night to bring the sky down with their strange howling circus mesmerized by moonbeams caught in the cacophony of starlight and the dust of a million harvested frogs and the dna of a thousand stranded motorists honking like geese in the asylum.

typing
with my eyes closed
a leap
into the chasm of mind
with no parachute