ALL RESPONSES |
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The elders all agreed, Marla would make a good wife
for Richard, a young man in line for the family farm,
one not prone to heavy drinking, but who knew
when to bring out the bottle and cut the deck,
might even offer a gentleman a fine cigar,
or help pull a neighbor's tractor out
of the spring mud when asked.
But, he had a temper
like his father's,
who had roughed
him up too many times
when Tennessee whiskey
was cheaper than good judgement.
One could only pray that divine hands
would guide him through the trials of life,
so that he might one day sit with men on Sunday
and bless those next in line for the burden of dominion. |
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i have circled the city
blocks for years
i have traveled years
back to when
voices were kinder
and i did not deny
what i loved the most
out of my life:
younger legs and a mind
for other matters |
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In spite of the suit and vest his brother’s wearing
I think George always looks nattier than the rest.
It’s not just what you wear but how.
And his hat somehow manages to find the best angle
to suit his nose. And I like its slant too.
It looks like Oscar feels caught out
wearing what looks like a baseball cap.
I do not rightly recall his favorite sports team.
He does appear to be hiding from the camera,
but it could be the fault of an inept photographer,
or one in a big hurry.
Wonder what Reuben was doing just prior.
Can’t recall if he always wore his tie
tucked in Army style. Maybe he thinks that
goes with that jaunty jockey cap he’s wearing today.
I don’t believe Nels ever ran for mayor
of North Mankato, but he sure looks dressed
as if he were. Does not look comfortable though,
and who would...wearing that silly looking hat
the likes of which I don’t recall seeing before.
I think the high-front trousers will back me up,
for I don’t recall if he is, but Fred looks
like the eldest, what with that sparse silver hair
he’s letting be seen today. Not surprising. The heat
has come rather early this year.
Never had the pleasure meeting Ted, and now
it’s clear I’ll not know what he looked like.
No one ever said he was camera-shy.
Sure would like to know who the photographer was.
Wish I had taken the trouble to talk more to Larance.
He was the friendliest of the bunch. Never saw him
not wearing a smile. He would have told me
all the rest of things I do not know about
the Johnson boys. One thing’s for sure. There never was
and never will be a finer crew of plasterers.
Or so I believe.
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Sheesh, I tells ya
Dey all da same...
Carryin' roun' dere ishooos…
with dere pa
if'n he no good…
'nif he was good,
…'meen even REEL good,
dere mebbe some jerk---
who scarred her
So.............
ya gots ta make up ferritt!
I mean,
lets get straight here!!!
Ya GOTS ta make up ferritt!!!
Show dem how we aint all jerks---
She can find out that sum of us gots some respect, kay?
An if'n she got's some yunguns, gotta be straight and square, eh?
Cuz may be
that those little ones seen some things
you aint been keen to,
mebbe you caint even think 'bout, huh?
Damn fellas, I hates ta be so d'rect, but you all know I got a sista,
…now dontcha?
Try an' tell me she aint a good'n...
just look me in the face and say that.
'Kay?
Now all you be single, or widwers, right?
I tell you straight!
Don't be messin.
You got ME to answer to!
And MY wife, god rest her soul, be watchin' all of you...
...but more 'portant,
dere's a
...sertin' man
up on yonda
who be seein'
how you all
are treatin'
his children of the female kind.
And he don't take no foolin'...
You best be watchin' yo akshins...
Cuz you all know dere aint be no foolin’
da big man…
Look me straight in the eye an' tell me I am wrong.
Just try’n tell me I am wrong…
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Always a little behind the times,
we men don't worry at the fact that
the sun keeps moving over and over
the sky.
What the hell we'd be doin' though, out
with the car any day but Sunday
wearing ties and suits,
no body had better know.
Some kind of men's club.
So if you're a little girl,
we'd probably allow your presence,
curled into your poppa's pant legs.
Or opa's, but otherwise,
I suggest you get a move on,
little girl. Yer too big.
Head into the barn
or into the house,
or even into the field
if we are wearing these suits
and ties, and talking about serious
things like the clouds.
And when It Is, that we're due
for some real, ground soakin' rain.
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The poet waits
till light begins to fade,
till the pivotal hour for poem posting passes.
Later she reasons with herself,
“There were no comments because
time was short.”
A new stimulus looms, a photo,
Six men of the fifties lounge in a farmyard
sharing their moment.
What does it say to the wordsmiths?
Poems pour in.
She lets go her need to be noticed.
Now she can admire leisurely her stanzas
unfolding – this particular enjambment,
that internal rhyme,
placement on the page.
It all comes together.
(Or doesn’t.)
How the ink messages the whiteness of paper.
How the poem falls gently
from the printer tray,
editorless – sans comment –
to the great white waste basket.
Where did her words go?
Nature awaits them
watches for them
in tomorrow’s molecules of smoke and sun,
in yesterday’s white-shirted farmyard dust and fire.
George Oscar Reuben Nels Fred Ted Laurence.
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the men were gentle.
Maybe set
in their expectations
of meat and potatoes at four,
fine tobacco, and sun-shielding hats,
but they winked their smile-wrinkled eyes
at their grand daughters, sending them
on their merry way
to the cotton fields
to play. Work and play
met one another in the fields, softly
whispered to one another
about the charm and grace of the sky--
how it painted the cotton and held it
in its large, woven bag
as tenderly as a farmhand holds
his priceless crop
his identity. |
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Desolate expanse of farmland.
Cars parked together for the night.
No one ever comes around here.
Rifles hang over back doors.
While the women cook supper,
the men stand outside and wait.
Lean against their cars and chat.
There’s rain coming, they know.
The kids way off in the distance.
They’ve run away, down the lane.
Toward the forest, and on a hunt.
Trap bugs, perhaps poke a dead bird. |
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Scrubbed her knuckles raw
doing laundry for all those kids.
Tended the fire, baked the bread,
swept and mop the floors,
sat up all night by a child with spots
praying not to lose anything more.
Sent the older to the barn, the youngest
to the coop to do chores, prayed for rain
prayed for the pennies to last all the way to the
end of the month, the lace crocheted
under her hands the only delicate
hope of beauty, the chance to sit
upright in church her sign of salvation.
Fell every night wearily into her
bed, hoped the preacher meant it
when he said, “Eternal rest.”
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it is funny to think that great-grandpa
was such a bastard as to judge
the world around him as it related
to the Great Depression only. but
when I heard his stories
of suffering through nights without
bread, or soup even, through weeks
without coal to heat the house
they lived in, his family, it helped me
understand that his youth was spent
before it had a chance to flourish;
my own days while young, lived
behind walls that my family’s church put up
through threatening and hammering
our fears like tack pins into oak, were
spent without a thought of how
poverty stricken we were--how
so many of our clothes passed
from family to family as us children
grew older, and bigger, and how we
were never in style...those things did
not matter because no outside eyes
were laid on us 90% of the time--
my own days were never as bad as his, my
lips were blue on Christmas morning from
the lack of heat in our building, but
there were presents beneath the tree--
a New Shirt--some socks--a TOY--
we believed in God and God took care of us,
so we believed: an excellent way to
pacify the masses. |
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You are a river in my arms,
flowing through me,
melting from vision
into deep caverns.
I am warmed by your breath
that presses against me
in slow, even rhythm.
Beyond the edge of your brow,
the sky rises to spell blue words.
I did not come looking for you,
nor for Truth and her paintings.
I was looking for something
I found long ago, and lost.
There are no words for it,
no drawings on walls.
You were looking for it, too.
I write its name in the clouds,
and when I'm done,
the letters float across the sky.
What do they say?
Read them to me with your holy voice. |
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Because I am convinced the Sun is a paper cup
tipped sideways, rolling across the empty lot of the sky
I pick it up and hold it to my ear--trying
to overhear celestial conversations
at the other end of the wire
because I'm convinced the whole contraption is
a communication device connecting me to a power higher,
or at least purer, than myself. Last night,
I woke my mother at three AM to drive me to McDonald's
for work. She smacked her tongue against the dry, red roof
of her mouth before guzzling
a swallow of orange juice from the jug--which
strengthened my theory about the Sun
because maybe the entity on the other side of it
likes a little Cosmic orange juice before going to work
and if ze backwashes into the container over there, it might
manifest over here as a sun ray that looks like a white worm hole--
a great tear in the fabric of the Universe that could swallow me up,
backwashing me at the foot of Jesus two thousand and eight years ago/Now
which is not where I'd like to be, finally, but
it's a start. I look Christ in the eyes and drink in the sap
of his two, brown flowers like a humming bird
with my long, straw beak and curling, party-favor tongue
sip sip sip sip Sipping the nectar of God, which is really
looking into the eyes of a great man and sensing
with the correct mechanism,
that I am looking into a mirror. Drunk
on the elixir of my future self realized, yet not having
a single word. Not:
Gold, Love, or God, not Power
to describe the experience.
Yesterday I tapped my polished fingernails
against a shot glass filled with Whiskey
sending a message in Morse code:
This One's for You, Baby!
.. . - -- __. .. .-- - .- --.... -.---. -----!
It was the best I could do when,
by the end of the bottle,
I still could not figure out how
to put a locket of my wavy hair
into hir non-hand
on the other side of the Sun
so ze'd understand what I mean
when I say
I Matter.
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Life through a photograph is fuzzy and removed- the negatives
cause the palms of your hands to be white fluorescent,
translucent. In the dirty dark waters of my own womb,
markings are carved from the Natives of a past I cannot leave.
The tribe of a lifetime of wild makes children unearned. Their small
nail beds and tiny forearms worth so much more than my sympathy.
The smiles on black and white gloss fade like
the horizon on a long day. Reality does not churn
wasted tears, like a fingerprint on the edge of all that was.
All of the memories that haunt my heart,
all pardons and pleas are up for sacrifice.
The need to be strong, no longer applies.
Life through a photograph is a see-saw of rawness.
I look up at failed fervency;
small angelic footprints in the snow and friends
on a Saturday night can never mask the nearness of a familiar face,
the fragility of family.
All of its love, a subtle binding. |
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Shame what happened to them after the fire. |
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our family story changes
day after day
we are rewritten
and the wrinkles in our lives
multiply
like the creases in a weathered
road map
hiding the past
each fold helps us
discover new places
blotting out old ones
for a minute
making them become
the backing for
our new history
each gathering rustles
the other facets of our lives
each new discovery
becomes an aged friend
in time
we hold hands like paper dolls
and when your ashes
mingle with my own
after all is done
or begun
we feed the soil
with our memories
finally giving
even as the past
is taken away |
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backlash of suicide
she’s angry with her mother
for leaving her that way
and if we try to tell her
something good
she cuts us off short
hatred is her salvation
she’s become bitter
and difficult to be around
she actually thought they
were better off without her
maybe they were
she sat us down and made us listen
she said
“look
i don’t remember her
all i know
is a mother just doesn’t
leave her children like that
i understand you all have
good memories of her
i simply can’t
hear that right now”
grandma decided it wouldn’t
be a good thing for her granddaughters
to read her poetry because
her words glorified suicide
i read and reread her poetry
obsessively after she died
trying to understand
there is pain in her words
but love as well
i want to hand over those poems
and tell her ... get to know her
like i got to know sylvia plath
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The school bus waits. Line of kids, shrinking up its stairs.
I cut the diagonal across my front yard, must use turbo.
See the foot of the last kid disappear. Still a-ways to go.
Every mean and laughing eye in there, set on me.
I hear my corduroy pants—szup, szup, szup—in stride.
( god ) I hope, desperately, no one hears.
And swear, may death come first, never to wear them again. |
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These are dust covered Outlaws
Long faded from the flare of fleeting life.
Once forged in furnaces,
They were ready to be everyone.
Commoner Strength- (numbers)
Six shooter sibling rival sarcasm
(spit in wind)
Bloodline muskets-
And bullet riddled brothers
They are dead now
At one with Earth's Everything,
Heaven's Everywhere |
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I was more of what I am, with all the sorrow.
I was what I saw in the pond and the pond
was gravely literal. It insinuated itself into my
dream. I dreamed of my grandson
as the night slid away and the sky
lightened and memory faded with the stars.
Here is some of what I was and with the sorrow
as he learns his colors and letters. Soon
he will examine cells under a microscope
and familiarize himself with a motherboard.
He may have what I never had. Scaffolding,
infrastructure, blueprints to navigate
a mountain range. He already knows
he will really be something. I know
shades of orange and gold and the star
above him. Now and then someone persuades
the sun, like an old-fashioned parasol,
to close and fold itself behind a muff of clouds.
The times were not much different when
I decided to turn here instead of going there.
When his turn comes, he will pop the top
and let loose the fireflies.
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This long breath is for you
if you were alive & sitting
in my living room: Black
words, Black skin, tight
language, leaping from
generation to generation
Your sexual nature another
time: nations, mountains,
trails across the mist of years.
The tunnels dug, patriotism
questioned & all barriers,
sorrows, and bias buried
by your non-smiles. There
is no barrier not crushed
by our dual music. Why
would i not see you
standing on those steps
for all those years? |
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my lovers
seemed to swallow me whole
i’m a monarch with poisonous wings
& they could always sense my leaving
before i left
perhaps it was something in my brow
my flit or maybe my touch
their insecurities
bloomed like stinging nettles
whine & accusations
only accelerated my departure
i question if their foreboding
was already there within them
or something about me created it
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She is centered with her few girls
camera shy in a sea of men and boys.
There must have been more women.
Like proper females, kept out
of the picture, in the kitchen
cooking for a mighty herd of boys.
Perhaps the Johnsons had a closet
cloner for males. A florence flask of
nucleic loops bubbling on the Bunsen
burner. Whatever the family recipe,
they didn't lack for farmhands.
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We stand on cliffs of Donegal, staring out
at Atlantic anger, whose foam becomes our wings.
We jump, holding hands, to cross the flood.
Your polished black boots slice the surface,
my lungs fill with brine, but our eyes
look straight ahead into the ale-dark sea.
Here our flesh transforms into the beautiful.
We wanted night and day, life and death,
one and zero, in the same instant, together.
To be in the storm, yet not consumed by it.
To hold each other tightly in a maelstrom
of wind and waves, eyes filled with future.
Smaller, smaller, until time no longer exists,
and God can hear our footsteps in the dark. |
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Have you felt the air tonight? Cold,
dropping from the sill of the window to our feet
to drag along the floor and disperse, pulling
to the edges of our room,
to curl around the low leaves and the steps to the porch,
to nestle against the sawhorse and the stinging nettle.
I run along the boards,
swing the door open,
twist the lock and stand
shivering in the kitchen,
where the warmth has risen from the stove
to rub its back against my palms.
The light is thin,
sneaking from the pantry
showing me the sleeping sigh
of a living room, barely, of couch and rug.
Feet in this light step softly past the silver stove,
smoking wood ash
balancing on a plated tray.
There are the shapes of frames on walls,
the sound of nothing besides sheets and skin
and outside, a cat running towards the weeds.
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We keep the Johnsons in a dusty shoebox,
pull them out when the grandkids visit
and shuffle through the past, tourists
in a monochrome landscape, a National
Geographic of strangers who begat us.
Stuffed into suits and puffy dresses,
bowlers propped at jaunty angles, bows
perched on powdered curls, their brows curious,
peering warily at the future's glassy eye.
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Tortured nights in the southeast;
where we laid easy and pasty white
down on the canopies that held
all of the things that believed in us.
Sister you were bigger but
you never thought you were better
You never made my eyes
cringe with lectures in sight.
Brother you were never there for me.
You were never the one who saw my
arms let go of our mother as she sank into the sea
gurgling white zinfandel and sea foam. Brother you
never saw us real, pasty white and laying down easy
for the boys who made us feel pretty when dad
called us flat-chested freaks.
Tortured nights in the southeast and secrets
are shared between two, my sister and I
where down on the canopies my mother
painted butterflies in the belief that she always had time to escape
and that she had done the best for her babies.
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His:
Standing on the front porch
i feel like praying
i don’t know what to ask;
what i want
God won’t give me
What I want is this:
to go back to sleep,
back before you walked
with me down Division
Street, our heads touching
under a blue umbrella
Our rain-dowsed hands
clenched like one fist
I would have protected you
from lions if i would have
had the chance
i never did
Hers:
Standing on the front porch
i did pray
that one day we would sit
down on a stone bench
and breathe lilacs
under a fierce sky
sip green tea together and read
our futures in the leaves
Maybe next time we’d receive
a fair warning of tears
and dark dresses
Yours, a far journey
in a boat strewn with purple liacs
my own boat loaded with sugar
and spice and everything nice
it never happened
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The sky tilted and
The clouds decided to touch down
On the ground
With such force that the road
Had to be cleared of branches and
Debris, and cars slowed to a stop
The clouds were a mass of
Malignant anger drawing in
The earth with a twisting finger
Of intention.
And the sky?
Well, it looked like a bruise
Gone three days past ripe
Flickering green and yellow
Infected and cantankerous
Looking down defiantly. |
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I’m dreaming of Minnesota, he told her,
place where we can start again
and work to be had. She loved to see
the hope on his face when he talked like this.
She confided to her sisters that she was
frightened. What if we can’t make it work?
she whispered. It is so far away. And cold.
A woman’s place to follow her husband.
His dream that she could hold
like a precious jewel in her
hands, breathe on it life, trust that he knew:
best for the family, fields of green
plenty he seemed to think. She was
dreaming of children fanned out around
her like a garden of flowers, like
a willingness to work, generations
to come. She didn’t know about
Minnesota. She did know her
vows were to honor and obey.
They packed up the quilts
and the cast-iron pots.
She brought along her tears in a
glazed earthenware jar.
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And the sky?
It tilted.
And the clouds?
They decided to touch down
With such force that the trees
Lay down in the road which then
Had to be cleared of branches and
Leaves, and cars slowed to a stop
The sky was a mass of
Malignant anger drawing in
The earth with a twisting finger
Of intention,
It was a bruise
Gone three days past ripe
We pass beneath its
Infected, cantankerous
Flickering green and yellow
Gaze. |
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A spring day in a Minnesota winter
students spill outside. Across the courtyard
someone’s playing a saxophone,
a simple, joyful melody.
I stand in the front of my students
reviewing sentences and fragments.
I ask them to find them in their journals.
They are going to teach English and they
will stand in front of classrooms some day
asking children to do this thing they hate,
put their writing under a microscope, dissect.
They want to have class outside not wander
into the maze of English syntax.
Jessica digs right in, head bent over the paper.
Toni and Josh help each other.
The melody floats in through the window
around us, through us, fragmented, restarted.
It sounds Turkish, then like jazz or a tango.
it could be anything from anywhere.
Suddenly I want to tell my students fragments
are everywhere, you can’t lift them out,
hold them up to microscope or light. Just listen
to that tune, how fragmented, how whole,
a part of this gift of a warm day in winter,
the way this moment holds yesterday, how
it holds tomorrow. but I don’t say it.
And the music stops.
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My older sister thinks
the man under the black sheet
will shoot. She isn't sure
whether to stand still or run.
We've both been ordered
to stand like statues.
My older sister looked old
before she was six. She didn't
run, but never married. I still
look younger than eighty,
and have outlived three wives. |
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On the way home
There was water standing
In the road, and she veered
To the middle lane
Seeking higher ground.
Still, the waters plume
Rising on either side
Of the car was
A sight to behold—
Us suddenly growing
Temporary wings
While the tires lost
Contact with the pavement.
For a moment we were
Weightless. |
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Johnson married Johnson
on June 14, 1962
among their many thoughts
that day: a thin blue tie, black
glasses, cigarettes and fingers
to touch them were
within inches of their lives
crew-cut hair, marriage vows,
black purse straps and instinct
to manage them were
lost somewhere between
his later alcoholism
and her longing desire
to touch his heart |
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I walked with you long ago
I made this trip before, when the idea of you was first born; I
imagined our steps
in the live sand, permanent history until the wind came.
I climbed that ritual site; tall and breathlessly old;
You watched me, never doubting that I would make it; yet
wondering how one reaches the sky solely by climbing.
I stood there, listening to the three visible lakes at a distance,
deep green water, as if reflections of ancient trees. In that afternoon heat
I could picture them stained- the warmth of innocents, on the cold flat rock, dripping down.
Not knowing if the will of gods were better excuses than greed, I tried to explain to you:
silver and gold once coated our dreams and made metals of humans; perhaps,
son, it was fear who gave us armors of stolen goods.
I found no clearer words to describe the trading of humans for wealth
but you childhood never flinched, and focused on buildings that lived;
the many strengths of ingenuity, covered by nature, uncovered by curiosity.
You focused on the hope of escape:
the ruins of Tulum; the physical windows that were closed
shadowing the foreign way through the reefs; their shattered ships ghosting underwater;
the rocky cliff shaping the natural sacrificial site for pretentious intruders.
I struggled to explain the past, the absence of our humanity; while you
in your six years of living, simply and refreshingly failed
to see the failure of mankind.
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In 1953, family still stood for something.
Everyone pitched in, and this was no exception
in the Johnsons family.
In small town America
Nothing was left to chance, and you stuck together.
Fred listened intently to his brother George.
The others stood or leaned against the car,
listening quietly, nodding or whispering their agreement.
Their farm was in trouble.
The area was been bought out as commercial property,
one farm at a time.
Progress does not take care of family affairs.
It mows you down,
strangles you with its moving forward at any cost.
Now the problem was if to fight it, join it,
or let go all together of what they had.
Fred knew his brothers were relying on him for a decision,
for the big times ahead.
A visionary, he listened in silence.
Maybe they could adapt, and if they did it together,
the family farm could be saved.
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Tonight is Franz. And all the wall a smudge.
Paint it. A darkness with many shoulders
and legs. A reader who reads. Tell him how
good he is. Tell him. He has to go, leave.
Tonight is Franz, not Johann or Lehar.
Not as musical. No plums or feathers,
rather heavier things like baseboard and rain.
Old the rain that fell. A Franz rain.
Tonight, make the decision. Cut the cake.
Tonight get off the floor and act. All
that’s done sets what comes. Awesome grid.
Night of shivers and destiny, that grimace.
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(...click here for image that inspired this)
The air of spring was sweet,
charged with the scent of fresh flowers.
The walk to Belegrade Church for Sunday’s school
was normally a nice one,
this year though spring was very warm
and Ellen walked as much as possible
under the shade of the trees along the dirt road.
She wore her beautiful Sunday dress
momma had washed and pressed.
A small pink ribbon pulled Ellen’s blonde hair together,
she wished though her mom had made her piggy-tails
because the heat of the morning
had Ellen’s hair already glued
to the back of her neck.
The song of the crickets and the one of the birds
was soothing as she thought of God.
Would they learn something about Paradise today?
Her younger brother Lawrence skipped right behind her
humming a tune, raising dust at each skip.
Ellen turned sharply to look at her brother and exclaimed:
“Lawrence, stop that! Momma won’t be happy
if she finds dirt on your Sunday clothes.”
One of Lawrence’s curls
was sitting on his forehead as a comma would on paper.
His mischievous eyes filled with the happiness
only a six year old could feel without shame.
He looked at his sister and stuck his tongue out at her.
“Lawrence Johnson! Wait until papa hears of this!
You’ll get in trouble, you will!”
And so said, turned around and resumed her walk.
Looking at the roof of the little white church
peeking through the trees, Ellen knew that
if Lawrence kept on misbehaving like that,
he would most certainly not get to Paradise!
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When mythologies become
The resting place
Of our known truths
And reality
Is only seen through
The misted glass
Of masques and façades
Then we need
The breaking hand
Of self-interest
To open up the door
To rediscovery. |
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She’s a lovely cold
sculpture, pretty veined
marble when nude
Open her mouth & one
might find a living museum
alive with color, waiting for rain
to follow her home.
He’s a solid man of truth,
a stutter of green water
Open his mouth & one
might find a sculptor,
hammer in both hands
waiting to mold a wife
from a distance as if looking
for life’s laughter in stone. |
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You pulled on the cord to the Christmas lights
and suddenly it was on fire — a limp plastic match
slumping towards your hand.
I said, drop it. Drop it! But you held on,
trying to press out the flame with your fingers. Finally, together,
we blew it out but you had burned yourself again.
In the bathroom, I grabbed a bottle and shook out three Advil,
but before I could offer, you reached for my hands —
the same as you had when we played spin-the-bottle way back,
and I had quit then, before I had to kiss anyone else.
And our two open, unspeaking mouths;
What are you asking for now?
All I can offer is plain, but it is for you.
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Tha awkward smile
on his mother's face
was most likely caused
by that piece of black rope
trying to pass as a tie.
But she was happy
he had given up smoking
unlike that guy,
supposedly one of the groomsmen.
All said and done
it had been a good day
for the bride failed to show,
and both could smile. |
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chant poetry fingertipped and skeined.
draw slowly through loops of silk,
reams of fire. press the pen
to your wrist and bleed ink.
trace a story in the sky with
the smoke of your sacrifice.
draw breath of supreme
unction. anoint your muse
with lilies and pearls.
take a moment to resist
all attempts to twist the path
way to the subliminal space that awaits
all of us conduits of light
and melody. blow the residue
of ash and tears into the wind.
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I look at this photo and ask myself
how many times I have halted my thoughts
to fit history into my busy life.
I had grandparents with photos similar to this,
yellowed pieces of papers
reminders of a life lived long ago.
They were people we are people,
even though very different
maybe because of the electronic life we live,
the work frenzy we breathe,
the traffic on the freeway we are
while driving exhausted toward home.
We raise our kids as if we have never known
the pleasure of running in a field chasing a ball,
as if we have never spent lazy time looking at the clouds,
playing with friends until dusk...
We turned out ok, we invent, build, discover,
while our kids go to therapists, are depressed,
contemplate suicide for a bad grade,
for the disappointment they feel they are to this society
always asking them for more,
sucking out of them innocence and childhood.
We build big homes for status not for big families,
our porches are for show and not as much for use.
We don't know our neighbors, and they don't know us...
I look at this old photo and wish to rediscover
the person I have inside,
the one that comes from old trees, and got lost
in the demands of today's society.
I look at this old photo and think of my grandparents,
wish to ask them to redirect my life
toward what’s important,
and while I look for the history inside my bones,
wish for them to leave their porch light on
to guide me home.
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| She woke in the night, the summer wind unexpectedly cool on her damp arms. Cars passed on the highway, what highway she couldn't remember; it was an anonymous honeymoon hotel on the fifth night of their marriage. A driving trip, she'd said, and he with that look of perpetual startlement that was still endearing even now into marriage, said, Yes, a driving trip. The curtains rose and fell as the wind swept steadily from the west. She'd called home that afternoon from a diner on the endless steppe of Montana. Her mother had the snapshots of their understated wedding, picked up from the photo-mat just minutes earlier. He'd worn his only suit, a deep blue sharkskin, and she a smock-like dress, and at the end the judge had said Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Johnsons. Her mother went through the pictures over the phone: This is a nice one, she said, of you and him holding hands. She sniffed and her mother said Are you all right? I'm just happy, she said, as she had since childhood, and she watched her husband. He wore the same blue suit and sat studiously eating a slice of pie, his form a dark shiny sillouhette against the diner's broad windows. She said, What's the next picture? |
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This is co-written by Alex Stolis and me, and can be found in the June/July issue of Flutter
I will search through every language for the right words
to name you, search until the perfect combinations
of sound matches the curve of your neck perhaps a soft
s to run down the edge of your spine or the slow corner
of a c to rest on your lips. Maybe the secretive slant of k
or m to brush against your bare legs and the light weight
of a j or lower case g to reflect the secrets that sleep
in the palm of your hand. I will save every story,
lock up fables about cloud drenched skies
in a box and watch the sun swallow the key.
When all the words ever dreamed are in my hands
I will read them back to you one by one.
And because I miss you, I will listen to the soft hum
of night, the sighs my old house makes when cold enters
its bones, and twilight blankets it with stars. I’d like to lie
on the roof, spread my arms and legs, fool the heavens
into thinking me a fallen star. I will keep a vigil, a tender
watch for the words left in your wake, the ones even god’s
would covet, the ones the earth and I crave. And now, my feet
are bare, I am ready to travel to the country made of words
fit for you. This land undulates with your verbs,
the city shimmers, built of brilliant nouns and pulsing adjectives.
And there is a garden with an old bell tower, a stable, and a loft filled
with hay--you will find my body there, in the shape of an x.
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Father now writes at night about our family
and the places we came from
the names only in his mind: our ancestors,
their children and their dead children
and their dead children and his own
dead child.
He writes history as he remembers,
sometimes skipping years at a time,
sometimes writing backwards,
using words nourished by his manhood
he writes one chapter at a time, often
in one sitting
chapters of my siblings are finished,
my mother’s is buried and only he
knows where.
He must finish soon before his fingers
go stiff, before his pencil runs out
of lead, before his memories are lost
like tarnished pennies through a hole
in his pocket.
I offered to write for him once;
the words come easier for me:
the educated one
the college son, able to move my finger
prints over each letter’s indention, able
to find perfect words for an imperfect world.
Once he’s gone, i will sit down to write my own
version on white paper, using real words
these perfect words will mean nothing,
they will be nothing compared to what was
not said on paper
by my father who has kept most words to himself
for most of his life. |
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