Featured Topic: Dreams
Featured Product: Seasons
Featured Writer: poets better and more famous than me
Featured Form: Rondel
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Winter Makes Wonder
Winter makes wonder which summer will wake me last before I under? Grey will rain outlast this stink, sink, sourful mood when wince-wind will past. And I blood, burn, brood— what was said and wished unsaid— fat, fresh, fill from food. Pull the push loose thread; pluck...
Sacrifice to an Unworthy God: a poem about why I hate my phone
I can no longer listen when the music plays, but shuffle, pause, piss, and then resume. Nothing's ever missed, and nothing heard or seen. The glistening screen commands my gaze and all I do is consume, consume, consume— until the stomach presses on the spleen. A lit...
A River’s Soliloquy
I am weary; I am not tired. Though only sleep and jest are true I do not think a rest will do. The river that once ran cold and clear now chokes with green. Mired with the accumulating silt of years. Youth was all constraint and indecision: a white-cold roiling to be...
For Now, Another Desk; A teacher procrastinates instead of saving the world
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot I scrape the gummy mess from the desks, the wall: the nametag of a favored student years before, then two more I can't remember well. I walk again down an empty hall...
When the Birds Call
You wake before the birds, during the dark's slow decay into the pale light of dawning day. Your mind holds thoughts— that hold no words, like dreams too-soon forgot. Outside, a lonesome cry, a beckoning belief that there is more than silent grief ...
Seaworm Speech
I doubt his oar had ever smote the wine dark sea when Homer, or whoever, wrote The Odyssey, nor had he spent a golden hour in the garden of a god. And so the 'epic' reads like virginal fantasy— fetish the clever, fever of stolen power; blind the warden; kill the...
As Through a Glass, Darkly
She appears in the glass like a watermark and her image in the window tells the score. Her eyes, reflected, look blinkered, tired, sore as she scrapes the dishes clean. Inside: herself. Outside: the dark, and this old face between. It seemed just weeks...
A Center that Will Hold
Even as we all are hurtling apart, following diverging vectors, there is comfort in the circling. Even our anchoring sun, who hectors the planets, orbits in a greater sky. We all circle and are circled by. We seek the very center that we fly from— the power that both...
Easter
I believe in the resurrection. With its birdsong and flowery filigree, springtime is a useful simile, but the meaning moves in only one direction. It is a life that was, and then was not: true flesh with dirt beneath the fingernails, an eye color that history has...
Notes from the Quarantine
Day 1 You tell yourself that you are going to learn French. Instead you make coffee with milk and tell yourself it's okay because they've yet to close the grocery stores; no need to break into the shelf-stable supplies. You tell yourself lies—that you'll use the time...
“When It’s ‘Gark’ Out”
She wakes from her nap with bedhead and pillow creases on her cheek then whispers, "When it's gark out, Momma coming home?" in toddler speak. I know correcting her lisp can wait for some other afternoon so I brush her hair back and confirm, "Yes, Momma will be home...
The Bloodred Stone
I once plucked a beach rock from his watery bed; beautiful, once brushed of sand, he did not complain, but now that he's home, he just lies there--dull and plain. Somewhere along the dirt path home he must have died. A lifeless grey replaced the impossible red, so I...
Dandelions
They say to write what you know, but what if there is nothing left to show? Nothing to paint but green on green, and all there is to see—already seen. No fresh petals curl up from the dirt, and meaning hangs like an ill-fitting shirt: stretched and shrunken, thin and...
Tooth by Rotten Tooth
Legs stirring before the alarm's tormenting beep, I wake from strange dreams in the autumn of my youth, and choke on broken promises I meant to keep-- a sludge that settles to the bottom with the truth where bottled thoughts belch the foam of cold fermented sleep and...
Wizard Nap
This dull and wintry day is still a weeping grey. But with the turning of a dial perhaps I'll force a smile by conjuring the warmth of June against this gloomy afternoon. Like a bored cat, I linger. I boil water with my finger. Yet, despite this warlock power, I mope...