Posts for June 10, 2026 (page 7)

You’re dozing off
when he comes on.
Well hell, he says,
it’s my country
and I can tell it, tell it tellit………..
his voice cracks like a cheap bell,
the clang,
the awful racket
clinking
into the utmost annoyance of your soul

Please, you ask, where are the ear plugs?
Shut him up.  PLease, let
the land forget what the land knows.
Let’s run away from his loaded bowl 
of infinite crap,
his clamor,  his stench hoisted
like the flag

of death.
Yet the end game goes on and on and on,
you want to turn it off, turn it off Forever and
let him spiral down into nothingness,
then:
the calm the love the hate the calm the calm

(The last line is from Samuel Beckett’s
bon bon il est un pays)

I find a place
between a woman
with bodega grocery bags
and a man holding a worn violin case.

The seat carries
someone’s remnant heat.

At the next stop
a pregnant woman presses in front of me.

We smile.

I give her my heated seat.

We are all just bodies
accepting
other bodies.

A forearm against my back.
A shoulder settles into mine.

The soft weight
of a stranger’s coat
glances my leg
every time
the train jostles.

I like this.

I miss touch.

I spend so much time
carefully contained.

Teaching my daughter
about boundaries.

Locking my door.

Not training the bite
out of my dog.

Sleeping alone.

For twenty minutes
we are animals in a den.
Warm.
Tolerant.
Breathing the same air.
No introductions.
No disclosures.
No one earning
the right
to be this close.

The train brakes hard.

A stranger’s hand
lands briefly
on my waist
to keep from falling.
Then disappears.
As if it never happened.

I think
there are people
I have loved
on the train.

I let the car rock me back
and forth like a bassinet.

In my 20s
I would get panic attacks
on the train.

It would start with a pain
in some unreachable part
of my back.

Suddenly there wasn’t enough air.
I would have to sit
on the dirty ground

before my body
made the decision
for me.

Really, I just didn’t know
how to let go.

How to love
not being in control.

At my stop
I step onto the platform.
The smell of 90s marijuana.
Someone laughing three cars away.

The crowd separates
like water
running down
a well-tread bank.

Already I miss them.

Balming breeze meets a chair set in mulch
making bearable the summerfying air–
a ritual of writing has been resumed.
Though the body’s sore from eight hours of working
the mind’s a buzzing hive of ideas
just waiting to see what sentiments will grow.

I’m feeling antsy
maybe because they keep descending
from the branches like tiny bombers.
Wouldn’t you like to have the durability of an ant
immune to terminal velocity,
able to fall from any height unscathed?

I’m going to drink an ant someday
because it will have taken a swim in my beverage 
and I won’t know it’s there
until it’s tumbling along my tongue.
But I try not to think about that too much–
for all I know it’s already happened.

Something else is needling me
like the pine’s gentle rain of miniscule missiles.
Goals not yet achieved and stories not yet told.
Seems a cat’s stolen my tongue from the ants
unless it’s just some catkins
licking me from above.

Then a grenade of a pinecone
skips across the bill of my hat
with the reminder that healing is war
and I’m a goddamn super-soldier. I know this
from everything the trees keep throwing at me.
Was that a tick I just flicked away?

Aw shucks, I’m starting to get sappy now
or maybe it’s the giant glob that dropped
into my flip-flop while my foot was free.
Now the bottom of my sole is sticky;
unpleasant, but what can you do? It’s risk assumed
from habitually seeking serenity 
sitting under the trees.

Walking down to the river, the old song resonated within her:

Oh we ain’t gonna have to cross no more

Down by the riverside

Down by the riverside

Down by the riverside

We ain’t gonna have to cross no more

Way down by that riverside

So many had tried, too many. Even though those that couldn’t swim, they tried. They had to, slavers weren’t far behind. She was with all her family then, Big Uncle Jim, he led the way. Uncle Jim, so kind, always smiling. They were lucky. In the fall, the river was low with everyone holding hands they could wade ‘cross together.

Reaching the river’s edge, she stopped and pulled the family quilt tight ‘round her shoulders. Staring at the river, the stones in the river bed…

i listened on my walk today ~ no silence in my head
came to realize block and a half later ~ mind chatter being fed
like a wild beast holding my leash ~ captured by an incessant hum
all of a sudden a crow overhead ~ demanding he be heard
what a bold white shitting uncouth bird!

screams afar ~ parochial kids pound out a game of four square
goin’ for blood ~ saying prayers to above ~ don’t even know what they mean
an obliterating trance dance ~ to erase sins ~ who wins?
attempt to free ~ vacillating vowels, snobby synonyms, anxious antonyms, staunch scripture, mildewed math facts and a nun’s stiffer than stiff habit!
no dog bark to distract ~ no chitchat ~ uniforms uni-formed conform

Pinto jar sprouts
colored
by
purple
lily windows

fifteen feet away one alone

sits dry /and/ still

I am surrounded by flecks dust
particles
I scraped carved scratched off
swirling in the air and scattering
in my throat
and still haven’t reached who I am meant to be
under my armor.

There is no waking up from the reality of your bad dreams
my house sits empty 
a void begins growing 
places you use to sit
haunted with the residual weight of some long ago late night conversation
will you be here forever
Haunting me 
your reflection in windows
your voice in walls 
I welcome your damnation
Your lingering curse
grief is a intoxicating 
I can’t stop drinking 

As day sifts through the window, my dreams want
to point me to the light, to steal into my life.  

My mind tightens: let me keep their branching colors,
their blaze—I want them on the page. 

I need to write, to write their blue and greens, to keep alive
their dark chill.  The page stays blank,

I cannot hear the voices, see the swaying arms. 
My words should be a blessing,  

a bright richness, every day
when I awake.  Through them—through dreams—I think.

I awake to sun w/a woman’s lips
& eyebrows, cheeks rouged by her
own heat, while I am now trunk
for torso, branches for legs, leaf
clusters for mammal hair.

There is a nest right by my ears
where nestlings whisper to me
as they sit on the blue shards
they’ve just made
by breaking free.  

And I see over the hills where
rabbits gallop—each runs
in a cellophane spangle that
crinkles candy red or cornflower
or sweet violet.

I make the journey with them on
branch-legs, rustling w/an older green,
robins in my ears, having released
my various facades to the sun,
mayshesavorthemeveryone.

Now I rush w/rabbits, always
just behind them—I swear
they have wings that
outrun childhood.