Category: Poetry
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Shelling
We cruised down the rattling washboard road, as Toni hugged the shaking steering wheel of her dad’s 1950 DeSoto sedan. She swore the faster we went, the less we’d feel the ruts. We parked next to sprawling bearberry shrubs and dragged our hot-soled Pro-Keds through the deep dune sand. She tossed sand high with…
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you made tea.
to make a cup of tea and think ugh, i’ve built this with my own hands as if creation requires disdain and everything you touch gets burned. peppermint leaves retain their buoyancy. you’re falling down a drainage hole of sorts, drenched and smelling sour. it’s unfair. i apologise for the difficulties,…
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a study in selfishness.
a study in selfishness. a lesson in understanding the reasons behind it. one must first learn the act of dissolving within all that currently limits you the math problem you trace back to your insomnia, the pineapples you cut through but can’t even swallow, another lover trying to escape when you’ve been too tired to…
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A Boy Is A Gun*
*You’re reading about history / the act of reconstructing narratives / without the seminal hold of … To unlock the rest of this poem, join the Circus!
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Interstice
It is not orange season and so the woman at the register charges two dollars extra to hunch over them – swaddle in my arms just a little bit longer There is a man at the park, jogging and does not stop so I cannot pet his dog and the dog and I eye each…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
