Tag: poetry
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The women of my family
The women of my family taught me to smile, but not with my teeth they taught me to smile with my eyes no matter how tall to never look down no matter how difficult the challenge to never look away they taught me how to choose fruit and how to choose friends, oddly enough a…
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inky skies
In the inky skies of paradise where the clouds are set ablaze and the cherubs bleed iridium, where she falls only to rise and grow until the branch breaks and she falls again into the abyss of abnormalities that are tattooed onto wrists in crimson ink as a reminder, like a post-it note that as…
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For They Shall Be Called Children of God
After “Peacemaker” by Kari Russell-Pool There will be a day when the names of tyrants are no longer spoken, not even as threats for misbehaving children. There will be a day when the names of tyrants are no longer written, the very letters plucked from books as easy as stitches from a sampler. …
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digest
Words have never satiated me so I tear the pages out of the thesaurus I let the synonyms synergize my sins and the antonyms antagonize my anomalies And at night I crawl under the covers and the words crawl under my corium they settle in the crevices of my flesh and inhabit my integument the…
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I built a rocketship
I built a rocketship, with kraft cardboard and Elmers glue that stuck to the pads of my fingers the epoxy of eternity on my epidermis just a mess of chemicals but then again isn’t that just all of us? I built my rocketship and dragged it into the yard the grass was wet and it…
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Depression
Your minutes become the rooms of a labyrinth, one concentric womb en route to another mere membranes apart. Each labor awaits you. You yearn to scream like a saint robbed of words, to pray in tongues long dismissed. Your hands dam your sides, trammel your ribs, each one a wing for the sobs, sharp and…
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Cento for a Slate Day
Beyond the shale night the rooster jumps up on the windowsill. I raise the machete— East Ridge going to the abattoir. Poetry is not a form but a result: what’s true of oceans is true of labyrinths. “You lie,” he cried, And ran on. Lois Marie Harrod This cento (or poetic…
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I think of Matisse’s goldfish
their reflection weightless on their painted water the way an ink blob might shoulder… … To unlock the rest of this poem, join the Circus! BECOME A MEMBER
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Dreaming in Flatware
I begin with the dinner fork and the salad fork but the forks multiply, the fish fork and this? an oyster fork, are we having oysters? you didn’t tell me we were having oysters, the oyster fork which is the only fork to be placed at the right side of the plate says a voice…
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Legacy
Adam stretches his arm The tip of his finger, Few inches shy of the Immortal— Mirroring the painter and his brush Reaching for the ceiling chapel Praying for resurrection— Or was it the other way around? Did Michelangelo intend to show An old God, aided by angles, Bent on reaching progeny, Reincarnation,…
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The Alchemy of Advice
For Rhina E That poem that you have to write will make you write it, you told us, eventually. Before it even is, it makes us ache inside? Is that the way it gets to be, like other fruits of creativity? As seeds spawn trees, so, for the simple sake of what is not, one…
