Category: Poetry (Page 11 of 20)
Horticulture
after Ed Ochester
Because Judy had given me for Christmas
a lumpen pot she’d pinched & baked
right in her kitchen, I tried my first
African Violet just after New Year’s.
The cat nosed its four furry leaves,
so I braced a two-by-six where fan belts
had hung when the place was a gas station. Continue reading
She holds in her skull
the quilted memory of a pain
fused with a metal plate.
Some nights she can feel the sky
hard as steel building to a muscled
roar. She is always fourteen.
In her the lightning waits Continue reading
Apparitions
I’ve seen them
in a breeze or a rain drop
A slow shadow or stunning beam
of light through the trees landing
on my child’s eyelash creating God
in a prism Continue reading
If a couple gets married
and one commits suicide on February 11th,
is it anyone’s fault?
Feminists can blame all they want.
Husbands can lament and take lashes
while they rewrite poetry.
Like a blinking eye that opens then closes-
what is-is. Unless it isn’t.
Depression was a black lung hung off
a rat’s tail on the tree by her window or-
asbestos pilled on plumbing pipes-unwrapped
and falling like snow-long before they said, ‘I DO.’
Long before, Sylvia swallowed 48 pills, slept
beneath her house, woke to try again.
Marriage is hard, poets complex,
Poetry is hard, marriage complex.
Like pulled threads in a sweater, they unraveled.
Depression created a triangle.
Factor in children and the figure converted
to a love pentagon-where two people wanted winged
poems sailing space and three sides were left hanging.
Pentagon then add a lover? That’s a hexagon.
The shape shifted, lost all sides, became thread-a heart,
became a pneumatic noose around a head roast.
Sylvia gasped air and faltered, fell asleep.
She wrote every day in the dark before a baby
banged pots on the floor, uttered, ‘ma-ma,’
while Ted left to write, wrangle crows.
Rejection lassoes perfection.
How romantic-two poets in the same house-
unparalleled love letters, mirrored muses:
in truth, for them, it was murder-
no, it was a contest-
no, it was academia-
publish, perish, publish, Pulitzer-no
noose was wide enough to capture
the universe of words that broke them-
no-broke her.
Instead of a valentine,
the noose became a knot.
You hate me. I can respect that.
After what your momma did to your daddy–
the lies like frozen honey, too cloudy
to look through–you can’t trust
a woman near him, like you have
an allergic reaction from proximity
alone, no need for a sting.
ONE OF THOSE SPRING DAYS WHERE THE RAIN FORGETS TO STOP
Rain comes down hard.
It feels like weeks on end now.
The weather is supposed to break for better,
But it never does.
And yet,
I’m happier than I’ve ever been.
Color. My life.
1. Silver
This structure was built in the 1800s. I can hear voices nibbling the dark, plum-colored gowns dancing the rooms, cigars burning. I am standing outside a heavy wooden door smoking a cigarette, somewhat hating its taste. I am alone and afraid of ghosts fond of an old building wearing a new life. This day is nothing but a mean lady coming out of a mean light. It feels like my life has been over for years and I have been standing here, smoking and watching my hands, paralyzed, hiding everything I am in my stomach next to a pie I just ate. I can only convince myself for a minute or two that New York is something more than good food and bad weather and cold talk of the cold men; that this never-ending minute will end and somewhere across the horizon the sun is watching the clock, waiting to deliver another impatient child I call “morning”. I will be a mother to it. Meanwhile – silver. Continue reading
The Pigeons Complain
Empty niches dirty dishes
Wishes like the trash
the wind sticks to our shins
Every agency of renewal
runs too fast or too late
Streets recite the scars inflicted by unpaid bills
A woman checks parked cars for unlocked doors
kicks open a broken barbecue on a cold sidewalk
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