Poems, Prose, Photos & the Art of Being Human
There will never be
only love
only peace
but there can be
more love than
before we got here
and more peace
because
we stayed here.
David Richo, Everyday Commitments
(Elizabeth creates 3-D art and photographs with eggshells because their fragility and strength parallel the human condition.)
girl with eyes too large and
milky teeth fairies must wait
years for in country that ripped
her from Mama locked her in
metal cage no laughter crosses
her howl swells into lost
others’ sounds for families
babies resounds past soiled
dreams strips belonging as
those ripping teach children
how arms are weapons
Thank you to Writers Resist for first publishing “Longing to Belong.”
Love’s a hitchhiker,
so innocent in its leap
that it doesn’t register
torn seats or sunroofs
but simply hears
come on in
and feels that smile
like a warm winter breeze,
but relationships
are rarely so simple:
the car must be washed
repaired, replaced
and trips planned
and changed with the
frequency of newborns’
diapers amidst increasing
conflict till compromise
shatters
like a windshield at eighty
against a centennial oak
but love, love is not so
complicated—once stripped
of metal and fuel it
shimmers naked, senses
open to sky and skunk,
blizzards and vistas,
and it’s never
blind but radiant as a star
and enigmatic as a body
after the heart’s
final
beat.
Thank you to the editors of The Tishman Review for first publishing this poem.
It’s crazy how much I love this girl:
if I am a pirate, she’s my mountain of gold
and while sailing at night, my northern star
and when we dock, she’s my Zanzibar.
(Joya picks up almost anything and turns it into a toy that she flips in the air, catches, chases, since everything is animate and joyful play in her world.)
wpc
As if disintegrating the stone of our being to sand
we pour ourselves empty to be remade beyond
the merciless sins we rise above.
The beauty of your breast now cleaved away,
my lungs always stomping their sun-flare dance against harm,
yet we reshape ourselves for one another as balm
till we can bear our stories’ terrible weight
till we are transformed as if sound—
water on granite, wind through pine,
an osprey’s haunting cry—
you and I as salt and sea and sky.
Thank you to the editors of The Tishman Review for first publishing this poem.
is just the shadow of the dog…
The dog is elsewhere, and constantly
on the move.
Dividing an elementary class into
boys on one side
girls on the other
invites each to imagine one group’s got
cooties! cooties! cooties!
and vulnerable to those who thrive on power
yet united, we eliminate disease, produce
thriving meccas of cultural exchange,
launch ourselves through the universe…
so if you’re invulnerable to ads and rhetoric,
think about a lemon–
thrust your teeth through thick
yellow skin to release zest’s
zinging scent and swallow
tart
puckering
juice.
That saliva now beading your gums…
Thank you to the editors of The Tishman Review for first publishing this poem.
Poetry doesn’t exist to give you prose. It’s this other thing. It is something that has to do with the sound of words, the sound of letters, the spaces between words, letters, how words connect to the mind and to the throat at the same time.
