Category: poetry

Love Your Neighbor

A highway with a necklace of beer glass.
I too am hemmed in by glass,
By broken mirrors and dashed bottles of wine and my second sight glasses a finished suicide.
Trucks come so bright,
And taxi drivers look with pity
As I walk miles in the snow without gloves,
Trying to get my new space heater home and turned on.
Then a man quietly pulls up next to me
And offers a ride.
His taxi is a minivan and I see his meter up front.
I told him thank you, but I have no money.
He said he wanted to help. No charge.
That is what we mean when we say love your neighbor.

Intersections

Clean diagonals are a favorite,
Chevron and parallel.
Parallels are easy,
Lonely yet satisfied
In a trip by herself in an untouched sliver of real.

Perpendiculars are problems.

Where two lines meet there is a point I can’t make,
An indispensable collision.
What happens at a point stays there
But the two lines on their way to nothing

Are forever changed.

Experiment with Long Poem

Treble clef blessed with a melody
That skims sour day.

Bas clef was never as loved
By almost anyone.

I am a percussionist
And I want no part of this healthy, well balanced fight.

Think of the loudest thing you ever heard.
Now dial it up like your grandmother you don’t call for a reason.

This story is not about me.

It is about the boy on the third row
In band class,
Who shrank to two feet tall when spoken to.

I did not speak to him
Because I was a mute.

I Felt bad for him.
He buried himself in the brass.

One day the band was waiting for him when he walked in
Sans band members

The trumpet yelled,
Sick with John’s cold.

You need to get a stronger tongue.
I have just the thing.

The trumpet flew to his mouth with the end blaring into
The boy’s throat and he convulsed as it scraped the
Insides of his toes and came back up again.

Then the boy could not stop speaking.
I listened from the instrument closet.

He was excited and incomprehensible
Until the flute whispered in his ear,
And he reunited with himself.

When the band members frolicked in
He said in a loud, smooth voice,
Give me the first chair.

A Rush

I am looking for trouble,
And I find it on a beach.
Trouble looms large and covers my breasts.
Crabs make their home in the sand.
I make mine at the sea and he holds me back.
I wanted to be my own deckhand until I decided to find trouble.
He removes my feet and I wanted nothing to do with it,
Stranded away from the ocean and his challenging eye.
Why did I need to get a rush while I waited at the dock?
His hands are like urchins,
And I want to swab every part of me clean.

Green

In the morning there was green,
A cool, whispering green infecting the spruce and air.

Within the covetous morning
They harbor the dark –
The spruce and air in collaboration with
More green than I can understand.

My sight is green like the stem of a flower
Used to promote something more interesting.

Green is what I see alone in the canals
That swerve my needs.

Yet I dislike al l but the brightest, loudest of greens
Because they remind me of my perfect noon.

10 Ways to See White

10 ways to see White

  1. I wore cream to my wedding. I never married before. Cream was left, somehow still accurate.
  2. The hall was so white I couldn’t see the iris. Snowy observer of my body thrown across the hall and through the rickety closet doors like a jacket in July.
  3. All records are clean before the incoming rain of experience.
  4. Curious cloud looking like a light at my legs bared on the beach.
  5. The tissue paper around the gift no one wrapped.
  6. The daisy I hunted for 23 years.
  7. Snow at the ski resort broken and used. I’ve got my skis.
  8. And the unreal white bones in my legs holding their breath before the trees.
  9. The moon over my body as I wait for the Reaper.
  10. My breath in the cold. Stopped like a song.

Small

Peppermint legs
Cool with the giant stripe of red legging.
She stands in her podium of potatoes
And sings Christmas carols to her children
Who hear their mother singing but don’t hear what she says.

Glasses make little things look bigger,
So finish your beer and peer into your glass.

This – candy holiday mother and spiced potatoes and unacknowledged songs
Will fade and they will wonder what they wanted to hear
And if she said it.

WIP 9th Letter

The yellow letter
Number 9
I can’t fathom the more dangerous work.

In my dressing pocket,
It’s a yellow nine.

I get my pancakes with extra syrup
When my husband makes breakfast.

I understand the shape of my body.
It is large and unrestricted.
And to come upon desire
With a desire for hidden light
Is to make lemonade in sum.

Daffodil,
Cream,
Egg yolk,
1980s hotpants
All 9 of my colors are yellow.

Taking emotional plans,
Airplanes,
And you’ve gone over the edge with my name.

One book is very simple,
Don’t take 90 years to decide.