Now Available in Paperback: Wine Songs, Vinegar Verses
Sometimes lovers enter a relationship with the best of intentions but wind up in a place far from love. Sometimes poets attempt love poems, simple and pure, but . . . Over breakfast, a husband trying to deny creeping out on his wife the previous night can’t help but give hints about the creepy things he really did. On a beach, a man minding his own business is accosted by a pretty woman before a strong tide embarrasses them both. A husband and wife debate over what to name a child conceived illicitly. A tone-deaf proposal for marriage ends Read more…
Monday Poem: Past Harvest
The wanderer handed the teller his note: “Crisp, clean, random-numbered leaves, untraceable—What’s my face telling you?” The teller rolled her eyes, clicked her tongue without alarm, ready to charm with her green-and-whites this hobbling fool in her parlor. Unable to speak, cursed to write only poetry, he’d arrived with colored bandages—Indian summer’s subtractions—wrapped smartly around his head. This barely walking, non-talking torture, he wanted a fortune, an ensured happy ending. It would cost nothing less than a charred piece of his heart. But the traveler had already torn and worn himself beyond destitution, his fevered destinations pulling Read more…
Monday Poem: In the Belly of a Sick Fish that Can’t Afford to Flush Itself
“You’re lucky I ever even looked at you” is not what Jonah wanted to hear on his blind date, twenty-second in a series of serious disappointments, boring glass-apple stories, robbed of even a moral at the core. And this latest was off to such a promising start, from his suggestion they meet for pre-supper coffee, cherry tarts, and ice cream, to shaking hands — no hugs — pulling out her chair, and beaming mere-mortal adoration of her list of endless talents, recited at a hummingbird’s pace before the first cup was even poured. Twenty minutes in, she asked about Read more…
Monday Poem: The Wild-Child Said: Love Made Me
Nauseous; Infectious—Why were we here two nights ago, all dressed down to our skintight lunacies? True love really never dies is a sick thought that lies on a bed of gravel, under a sheet of sleet, traveled over by a sled we shared, taking turns pulling it with our clenched teeth. We’re suffering for it, that wonderful grueling nighttime adventure. Not exactly “romantic” in the sense of the adjective I’d grown up knowing and loving, but still— We were one, alone, cold, needing each other. Now we’re ill, together, in the same naughty spot making each other sicker. The Read more…
Monday Poem: Love, Uninvolved (in its own horror)
What if, when you die, you get stuck in one of your old dreams? Like the knotty one where you keep telling me, “There’s so much I’m not telling you”? I’m thinking of us at City Hall, combined, dancing— With four sinister feet . . . The best citizens lined up in a parade to gawk, and grin, and hear me serenade you. Hear me say a prayer: God, excuse their grins. Me, in black; you, in off-white. We don’t want to show off anything too bright. Anything enters Everything, spits out Nothing Read more…
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