Tag: poetry

Tendrils, Fence, Sneaking around after dark

Tendrils of ivy are hatching in God’s drawings of the South. The South is a forest green. New England is blue. The mid atlantic is cream.

Fake things bother me. Even fake blood.

The spirits were behind the children, not in front of them. 

Trick or Treat!

Sorry, nothing left.

I snuck under the fence into the field, hiding from the horses. If you stood at the crest of the hill you could see Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and a bit Radford twinkling in the dark. Somehow we spooked the horses, and I had to flatten like a piece of paper underneath that electric fence again ASAP to get out of there and escape.

Subcommittees

My subconscious is a group project with many subcommittees.
Hopefully there are people much smarter than me
Making some of these decisions.

As it stands,
I have my hand in an oil can
While building a house from matches.
At night I fear silence so I whisper my anthems to God,
I spend the day trying to be a kite-
And then burning every kite in a 10 mile radius because I’m mad I failed.

The wind in the conifers beckons,
Yet the subcommittees have all voted no,
And I cry in my yard

and don’t understand why I do

Red

Desiccated red like a rose picked apart
By the sort of angry young man who would tear the wings off a butterfly
For free.

Red speaks to me in a cracked voice.
She was a sultry with a temper.
Now her skin is a desert.

She tells me to avoid the heat of summer and grasp spring-
Before the boys become men by the river

I lay in bed at night thinking about that rose
And her love for me.

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.

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.