Lexington Poetry Month Writing Challenge (#LexPoMo)

Category

Poem

What is More Generous than a Window?

Eyes planted on a corner ~ pods dance from limb to limb
holding on for dear life
old growth Elms shadow print triangles, squares, and parallelograms
prehistoric creatures strutting on an over grown pittosporum tenuifolium

Warm winds dance in 4/4 time as crows circle
laughing at us trying to make sense of their algorithm
and afternoon shadows brace and embrace mindlessly
driven by checked-out overscheduled robots trying too hard to chauffeur
on a spinning hamster wheel of gotta have it all

An elder woman walks alone cane in hand
stops to bend and nod into a carriage pram
baby looks up with her gummy grin
and for a moment the one who has seen so many afternoons
and the one who’s seen but a few ~ bless each other with the
beauty of beginnings and wondrous wonder of wise endings

Vignettes directed through the eyes of generous windows
Windows of old and new souls
Windows of Nature’s bright-eyed balance
as the curtains open and close

J.E. Barr

Category

Poem

6/24/25

The Muses

I’m looking for a metaphor,
one which hides my pain,
to mask the truths which freely pour
truths I don’t want them to gain.

Safely I reside here
in a space where I’m most me,
away from those I hold most dear;
muses from which rage comes free.

I should likely build these walls up
strangers, I’m told you cannot trust.
Their words, a tonic to my cup
to learn from them, I must.

Am I just writing in this diary
or a lynching those who love me?

Diana Worthington

Category

Poem

6/24/25

Mental Warfare

Is showing up in conversations
you and me and the microwave dinner are all feeling
heated
Our plates loaded up like power struggles
everyone wants a point proven NOW
Hot N’ ready
Beneath a surplus of truth protector armor
a battle bubbles up without words inside us
a rolling boil
like a kettle spitting tea before the steam can whistle
in truth, energy speaks louder than words

Josie Angel

Category

Poem

6/24/25

To A Character On a TV Show…

To a character on a TV show who killed herself:

I needed you to fight

and give me hope to keep fighting.

I’m angry that you gave up.

I’m angry that part of me

often wants to give up.

I needed you to overcome your circumstances

so I could feel inspired to overcome mine.

I can’t sleep tonight

thinking about you,

thinking about how alike we are,

thinking about how alike I don’t want us to be.

I keep slamming into the same walls,

the same hopelessness,

the same feeling of being trapped,

the same feeling that

life is never going to let me have

what I want and need.

I’m so fucking mad at you.

Because I related to you.

And the only solution

you showed me

to a situation like ours

was death.

I’m exhausted.

I’m so fucking tired of fighting.

I’m so fucking tired of trying.

I was excited to see a woman like me

escape from the clutches of darkness

I thought you were drawing us a map to freedom

and instead…

I hate your creators.

They are shitty gods.

They couldn’t dream a better ending for you.

I write out alternate futures and timelines for myself.

I wish I could believe in just one of them.

Fuck you for dying

and for choosing death.

Fuck you for plunging me

into despair

on a night when I was only seeking escape.

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Winter Dawn Burns

Category

Poem

6/24/25

Burdens and Holdings

Burdens and Holdings:

This burning heat is a thirsting pain of unmovable wisdom and a dark dawn that sours glass against the cold of Winter. The hypnotizing zephyr of juvenescence is nothing without the kiss of the relentless desert grit.
To differentiate between indices and the nuclear breeze is like sailing through a broken oxbow while remembering that dances aren’t dreams and footprints aren’t seen once the ocean washes them away. Oh, how can we afford to invest in the forgotten traveler who searches for the resolution to the chorus of crying gulls and the promise of unsalted waters? And how can a poet know what to save when nothing means anything at all or everything means something to someone but not everyone? But still, we continue to conjugate time with gifts of flowers, feathers, and bones in the hopes that we will not have to walk through fires to get back home. When the seed surfaces, maybe we will see where the door goes. Or maybe we can move through the lens of a language that sounds like a million sweet lullabies. Or maybe a cease-fire will mean something.

©️Winter Dawn Burns

maddie mitchell

Category

Poem

6/24/25

seeing and seen

poets have eyes
they have opened
stay peeled, even as they dry
without tears left to spill
for those chosen to be blind

telling how poets always see
literate, read, written, and weeping

P.C. Cimex

Category

Poem

6/24/25

Oothacal

“It’s really something to see…….constantly…

how many people…..are dying for lack..

of an encouraging…word……..

and how easy it is to provide that…if you’re careful,

you know, give credit where credit is due

and to say…….you’re a net force for good

if you want to be.”

–Dr. Jordan Peterson to Piers Morgan
while choking up in tears

The male loneliness epidemic.
Real thing or no?
An accurate description for a problem
or a misrepresentative umbrella
for several individual, if not wholly unrelated issues?
Veiled misogyny or a name to focus solutions on?
Are we taking care of our responses
when they cry men are lonelier than ever before!?
I remember when I was pushing back
against people screaming ‘All Lives Matter!’
but what, besides the realities of the problems at hand,
makes everybody’s lonelier! any better to say?

Because for me
it’s not so much about a house catching fire
and needing saving from oppressive flame
but a house sickened with insects
needing treatment for infestation.

Truly, we are a people further drifting apart
with the tectonal shiftings of infinite access,
but would you disagree that there’s a demographic
clearly not coping as well with it all?
Young men running into the incongruence
of reality versus the media they consume–
movies, games, pornographies,
and all the anachronistic ways
male role models say to be a man;
how divorced all of that is becoming from daily life,
how easy it is for one to lose their way.
Is this something that should be denied?

Yeah, maybe the words are wrong
and yeah absolutely, men are using those words
to justify bad behavior, but change
doesn’t and never has happened in a day.
Is it not better to keep a conversation going,
to maybe find and refine more effective solutions?
Ways to assuage unemployment, uneducation,
emotional damage and the many atrocities
men will commit against themselves?

‘Cause when we’re getting to those points
I don’t really care what it’s all called,
I just want to see issues actually addressed,
whether that’s simply giving a man space to speak
or, particularly by the good and wise men,
to show the new way that masculinity should be.

Or, you know, you could keep chasing them
back into the shadows
where they’ll bond in commiseration
only to return for next elections
in greater and stronger numbers.

Shaun Turner

Category

Poem

6/24/25

Field Report of Breathing

Feel the Apple Store: more than wet—

even the glass seems to sweat,

condensation curl like slow script

down its spine.

Shuffle through automatic doors.

Wear your O₂ like a necessary ghost,

tank small, insistent across your shoulder

like a vestment. Hear your breath,

a mechanical psalm.

Carry your body’s hitch,

its visible machine

among many sleek brethren.

White walls thrum with youth.

The fluorescent cold a respite

of sorts, tables slick as bone.

The aluminum children

tap screens like monks

illuminating texts. Sweat

through cotton, cannula

cling—plastic taste like a tongue depressor,

Texture in your nose

a hard warning.

Recall the ability to stand

long enough to browse.

Watch a Genius blink, tap fast

on a tablet-sized grief.

Hear a man

cough into his sleeve.

Catch another

spit low hate at the manager.

A woman lingers in summer wool,

fretting.

You want to go home, too–to return

to its familiar walls, the smell of smoke,

where just one breath turns so easily

into another without this tender tether.

So lay your boss’s QR code

on the counter—warm

as fresh eggs.

A child’s scream–PLEASE!

So watch a receipt unspool

like a scroll or banner.

Say Thank you.

You can leave into the heat.

N. D

Category

Poem

6/24/25

Plague

each memory of you tugs mercilessly on my heartstrings,
a choir of church bells echoing through the vacant halls
we once filled with spirited merriment

their cacophonous chorus, twisted and mocking,
ghosts of once sweet music
left to scream into nothingness

Haley Biddle

Category

Poem

6/24/25

What Kind Of Woman

She laughs.

She laughs as if her eyes are small pennies

that disappear into the mouth of a spiral wishing well.

She does this often —

it catches you like the optimistic flu.

She loves.

She loves everyone and hates no one.

She loves to give with grace and surprise your face.

She is the beaming sunflower that grows taller than us

both.

She listens.

She listens before she speaks —

a practice of many, a talent of few.

If you listen,

you’ll notice she says more than she doesn’t,

but only truth escapes her lips.

She lingers.

She lingers in the words of her letters.

Her blood is made of pencil lead that pumps every page.

She stretches her spine in the card catalog,

a collection of intentions to be brought to life.

She lives.

She lives in the honeysuckle hum of the rural hummingbird.

The whistle of the land sings her name.

All that she is

is all that she was –

unforgettable.

Help us keep on giving.

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