Posts for June 3, 2026 (page 2)

spring elm –
crooked resistance
reborn shade

I walk two miles to lay on the kitchen floor at
the house of my friends who just got married.
I am overheated and
saturated with feeling.
Not about anything in particular,
just indulging in personhood.
As sticky as this is it’s also
refreshing.
Like Ramsey said at a show in Chicago,
about this girl who loves me without any sarcasm.
Well, that’s refreshing. And it is.
Or looking at my naked body in the mirror for a long time.
I have been feeling neither satiated nor
saturated with feeling.
How can you grieve as much as I have without
accidentally blowing yourself out?
Grandparents and muscle mass and short skirts.
I am bereft and floppy and mature. Horrible.
Everything’s changing except,
I always try to light candles under the ceiling fan.
Discovering, surprised, that they have been extinguished.

Here on this walk, though, I’m blue at the base 
and still lighting matches.

Major Tom, I’ve known loneliness
like yours in outer space.
I’ve felt space
between myself and everyone
else, between myself and
myself even.
I eat buttered popcorn in the dark and stare
into other people’s dreams.
I hope you’ve got dazzling starlight
and color television far above the world.
Down here, Mom beat my older sister
with a curtain rod and smashed our TV
with a hammer, called it the idiot box
after that Twilight Zone episode
where little Anthony makes and kills
a three-headed guinea pig, wishes
his playmates into a cornfield, sets
a man on fire and everyone has to say,
That’s real good. It’s real good you done that.
My sisters and I walk on eggshells
around Mom, and Dad’s gone now.
He hopped into his VW Rabbit and onto the road.
His car knows which way to go—
far away from here.
He may as well be out in space—
he’s so far away.
Regret
is the piranha I’m not
old enough to keep as a pet,
but there it is, eating everything
else in the bowl,
and it looks at me like it wishes
it could sing a song about eating me
before eating me, but a fishbowl
is a window that lets everyone
see into you. Are aliens watching you,
Major Tom? Do you feel like
you belong to the darkness
now? Do you think I’m
an alien? Do you
miss the blue sky filled with birds
shaped like clouds and the smell
of burning from the paper factory
beside the freeway? Do you
miss your family or manual typewriters
or gangster movies or a time before
arthritis or the way a guitar
sounds as it smashes onstage
or the way meat smells
different each minute on the grill
or knowing whether your stocks
are soaring or crashing? Are you
soaring or crashing, Major Tom?
Inside every child, there’s a forest,
but mine’s on fire. My heartbeat
sounds like stampeding in my chest
but not fast enough. If you could
come down now,
where would you land?
How about my roof?
Sometimes I climb up there
to clean the gutters and to squint
at the stars until I think
I can see you seeing
my hands holding a homemade sign
that says Help!

(After Gwendolyn Brooks and bone folder press)

she’s either fucking or fighting
and I find myself wishing I’d
ever felt something so deeply
my neighbors could hear me
through walls
and simultaneously grateful
no one has ever made me
raise my voice to the point of
cracking; my soul a broken dam
of drywall for strangers to
press their ears against.

on the off chance their ears
have pricked to my voice
it’s been for pleasure, self made
a ballad of yearning,
the frequencies major
the crescendos driving
but always a solo

“Wait!” I jumped out of the truck and sprinted down the driveway. “There are 7!”

“7? How? Why?” He was just as surprised as I.

The 2 of us stood there, doors ajar, engine running – in the early March snow, when it’s way too cold for anything to grow, 109 collective years of life experience and 6 college degrees between us – and counted them (still half-smashed under the wall) out loud, together.

1-2-3-4-5-6-7.  
An enigma.

Then we silently returned to the truck and to our daily reality, bewildered.

Because the daffodils were there when we moved in and there were always 2 or 3 white and yellow flowers, never more.  Well…except for the years we planted more bulbs, which was always a monumental waste of time and money.  Or when we buried them deep, inadvertently, under a concrete wall when we replaced the front stairs during the pandemic and just one.single.daffodil popped up the following year.

But without any intervention on our part, and after 20 years, the floral equilibrium spontaneously reset to 3X+1.  And it felt off, ominous.  Like a rip in the space-time continuum, a glitch in the matrix.

There must be a lesson to be learned from those daffodils, but what?
Seven wonder(ful daffodils) of the ancient world
Seven day-ffodils of the week
Seven continents (of daffodils)
Seven daffodils road
Seven deadly daffodils
The house of the seven daffodils

                                      Inspired by yesterday’s grit and grains  

Why so blue?
Do you miss your fluff-fickle friends? 
I’ll spend the day with you
You can put on a fashion show
Try on every nuanced dress in your closet 
Strut like you’re the backdrop of our passions
The sandbox of our dreams
I’m great at ooohing and aaahing
You can tell me stories
You’re a master of the playful
A poet of the roses
We’ll spend the time drinking in the sun
Toast the stories where you mic drop that colorful language
Later don your diamonds
And pitch the dark tales
The quiet ones with haunting sound effects
I’ll even sit with you during that hour of sorrow
When the truth gets dewy-eyed    
I’ll tell you that tomorrow is another day
Tell you to smear yesterday’s cares into the dawn’s finger paint
Tell you to remember your power
Your glory
Your oh-so-magnificent light    

In the Garden of Eden for Seventeen Minutes and Five Seconds
by Marianne Peel  

She grabs my hand
and guides me down the narrow passage
to her basement art studio.  A whole wall
floats an ocean of psychedelic acrylic creatures,
jitterbugging seahorses,
Texas-two-stepping star fish,
all between the borders of cinder blocks.  

Let’s smoke a joint, she tells me.  

And I remember being in another basement                         
in 1975, just after Saigon fell. Choppers lifted
whoever pushed their way to the front
up and out of the red clay of Vietnam.
From a couch with broken ribs, we watch
the rooftop ascension
on 60 Minutes.  

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida grinds
on the turntable.  A dizzying riff on a loop,
spiraling between our smoke rings.
Eddie and I make out.
Our adolescent limbs fumble,
ferreting out whatever innocent skin
we can find.  
During the two-and-a-half-minute
drum solo by Ron Bushy, Eddie tugs
on the fringe of my cutoff jeans.
Unravels me
as he runs his fingers along the edges
of my embroidered peasant blouse.                                       
Fueled by this rock n roll that feels
so much like a hymn, I watch
the iron butterfly of me
shimmy out of its cocoon,
abandon its weight,
take flight to the cob-webbed rafters.      

Eyes red. Strained. Too sore.
TV static. Late night ghosts
on the radio.