The Genuine Blogger Award

Thank you very, very much Francina at Seasons Poetry for nominating me for the Genuine Blogger Award. I’ve barely written or even looked at my blog the past couple of months, so it’s now my intention to do a better job of keeping up. As always, I’m incredibly grateful for Francina’s support since I started writing in November. Please take a look at her work as you will not be disappointed.

The Hill of the Poisonous Tree

Restaurant chitchat brought me here,
strange and alone. It’s Christmas Eve
and the gates of this dormant Hell aren’t
tended today by a horror of war,
impasted face a fiery swirl of molten rock.

I’ve heard of him.
I’ve heard of what those landmines can do.

Only seven walked away free and dead
just enough to keep themselves alive, and I
walk in to see about it all, to hold the million
anonymous ruins of sanctity and deprivation.
Time was crushed against the tree’s scarlet
trunk, then scattered like bird feed on a day
clean and bright as polished rice. Pieces fell
here, but they never grew back again—
the air is frantic and quick with fear. These rooms
that spoke to curious minds later broke them
and their bodies too before a final, blindfolded
crack in the sightless night. Corpses kept the dog
ma fed, but its hunger grew. So it is our sameness
that divides and kills us over and again.
We think we’re changing, but it never lasts.
We just learn to do it quicker and better.

Panned

You used to sit
In the garden of lunatics
You call your home
And still walk freely
But now you’ve buried
Your Feet in their soil
To keep you small
As the pool gets deeper

I’m not the one
To pull you out either

Oh, Peter

Arcing Towards Whole

Glued to these merciless stories,
bottomless like diner coffee
hot and opaque
keeping the narrative arc awake
while stale birth thighs sting
as much as an empty wallet
or pawned wedding gold.

Peel them off plot by plot,
skin by skin, and what’s left—
tender and purple-red
like a grape to be trampled
and set aside in dark glass.

Decant, decant,
the transformation is complete.

Everglades City

Let’s drive, before gas prices surge,
to the place where Washingtonia robusta
extend spindly trunks 140 years skywards.
We can stop for pancakes along the highway.

Let’s drive to the coast’s final holdout,
where mullet prices sunk like a battered fishing boat,
and Colombia called through dense canopy.
We can stop for a beer along the highway.

Drive with me to the wealth of before—
before poverty’s attendants opened
the window to your warmth and mine, to be
consumed by winter’s gluttonous chill.

Drive with me to now’s perfection;
we’re left only with this excellence
and an unfilled prophecy at risk to be
consumed by winter’s gluttonous chill.

black mosquito sings . . .

black mosquito sings . . .
damp upper lip
tastes of salt

After the Flood

Chew on dried apricots
in the Himalayan heat;
listen near the candle’s
tiny blaze for the heavens to
crack apart like brittle chalk
once again.
The thunder of migrating
clay can make the sky
clench its fists with envy;
like a gang of mounted bandits
it waits for night to charge
boldly down the mountain
and siege the slumbering . . . .
Mud can carry a bus for miles
and expose a useless army.

That night, mud was God.