The Showbear Family Circus

Category: Entertainment

  • Art Class

    Art Class

    – for Beryl Thomas   Mrs. Thomas stood before the class, colored chalk dust flecked across her navy blue blouse.  She snipped the folded paper this angle, that, this curve, and straight, and opened it to a T or a B.  We made an alphabet louder than we could speak or write, to frame the…

  • Reincarnation

    Reincarnation

    —after Wallace Stevens   I placed a tattered sonnet in a Mason jar on a low hill in Tennessee, adrift and lost, and waited for rains to wash my frail poem far eastward, tumbling to brook, to stream, river-tossed   past roots and slim hulls to wave swells of the sea. By current shape and…

  • Bleed Till the Last Drop

    Bleed Till the Last Drop

    He watches her with sorrow. Watches his friend, his confidant, give all that she can, and then let the people she serves tear her open for more. He watches her bleed for her people – their people – as if it doesn’t hurt. As if she’s not giving everything that she is to them and…

  • Before Mud Season

    Before Mud Season

    Smoke from chimneys leak into houses, windows cracked eager to suck in anything fresh. Elated Mothers, doffing last year’s LL Bean spring collections, no longer scold frisky pent-up children for leaving doors wide-open. Soon, they’ll shriek about thick blackish gray mud trekked in all day and night, but not yet.  Dirty iced snow hangs on…

  • Call

    Call

    What do you do when the burglar winding in your window at night bellows, Call, call the police? There were knives in the kitchen, sticks along the wall, a screw gun and the OED.  Mother Earth sang a Capella when she cloned it ten. It could have been more.  Then came the report: sleeper lurches…

  • The Purple Pacifier

    The Purple Pacifier

    The purple pacifier vanished One week ago. I found it today While rocking the baby: deserted Like a dead man’s sombrero That was blown by a western wind Against a stubby leg Of the gray changing table, blended As gray and purple tend to do, Sticking its tongue out at me This whole time Like…

  • Big Dave

    Big Dave

        The priest slid from Latin to English like a kid on a skateboard coming up to scrape a bench. A catch of breath and he launched into the eulogy. No one else in the church spoke Latin, of course. It was a comfortable background noise, a drone, a lullaby. In English he was…

  • Tourist

    Tourist

    Like a feral cat Seeking warmth From the bellies of Freshly parked cars, I dart from Rotting moments For pockets Of peace.

  • Used car lot shepherd

    Used car lot shepherd

    Before smart devices most lads aspired to astronaut or president. Sister Mary Black an’ Decker prayed that I would grow into a priest. She was a bit strange. I loved her. With her right sleeve rolled and ruler poised, her bicep damselfly tattoo smiled. Neighborhood pals and I pooled our money buying old Mercury. Didn’t…

  • Loveliest

    Loveliest

    O, my loveliest one, amidst a bankruptcy of souls, I see you as an invitation—   your torso is a delight and a metaphor, your feet are a message for future alms.   In the treachery of ideologues, I see you as a vital sign, a watermark of goodness.   In an erratic world, I…

  • Heart of Glass

    Heart of Glass

    When we look in the mirror, what do we see? Do we see the fragile heart of someone, on the verge of breaking? Do we see all their inner thoughts, their tireless demons, the wounds of their youth? No. We see only their surface. The small flaws on their chin, the light flushing of their…

  • Pulse

    Pulse

    How do we read stardust in fine print? How can we find silence within a constant chorus of speech and penitence?   I hear only the uncertainty of two a.m. I see only the life of a dauntless troubadour, searching through the shadows and singing in riddles.   You, the seeker of yes, a purveyor…