Your heart is the size of an ocean; Go find yourself in its hidden depths. Find sweetness in your own heart, then you may find the sweetness in every heart. ~ Rumi~
Sweetness
Category: poetry
Touch
TOUCH hands awaken stars in skin till our palms press peace deep as breath yet this snow-blind animal need for touch shared by grooming apes and dogs sleeping entwined is rarely about sex but instead our primal need to know we are not stones tossed out to sea as we breathe the same air molecules shared in this brief habitation of skin
Thank you to the editors of 5AM for first publishing this poem.
Dark in Light
DARK IN LIGHT Wanted to show you the moon but cruised off the wrong ramp and wound up in a war zone where there is no curfew: men standing solo in the middle of the street or huddled, talking beneath burned-out lamps; wanted to show you the soccer moon but drove down darkened roads with bars enclosing windows and doors, barbed wire spiraling a hardware store and nursery—planks and daisies out of reach; wanted you to count the seas across that haloed orb but drove alone through neighborhoods as treeless as that dog-song moon; beat-up cars driven beyond unmarked borders pulled over by uniforms with clubs and guns, jagged tension cutting concrete air; I want to know who declared this war of Americans against Americans: children peer from sheeted windows, women hide behind hollow doors, a man looks up from an empty street, each of us equal distance from the sun’s reflective sphere.
Thank you to the editor of Something Like Homesickness for first publishing this poem.
Día de Muertos
painting & photo by Elizabeth
THE CHOIR I walk and I rest while the eyes of my dead look through my own, inaudible hosannas greet the panorama charged serene and almost ultraviolet with so much witness. Holy the sea, the palpitating membrane divided into dazzling fields and whaledark by the sun. Holy the dark, pierced by late revelers and dawnbirds, the garbage truck suspended in shy light, the oystershell and crushed clam of the driveway, the dahlia pressed like lotus on its open palm. Holy the handmade and created side by side, the sapphire of their marriage, green flies and shit in condums in the crabshell rinsed by the buzzing tide. Holy the light-- the poison ivy livid in its glare, the gypsy moths festooning the pine barrens, the mating monarch butterflies between the chic boutiques. The mermaids handprint on the artificial reef. Holy the we, cast in the mermaid's image, smooth crotch of mystery and scale, inscrutable until divulged by god and sex into its gender, every touch a secret intercourse with angels as we walk proffered and taken. Their great wings batter the air, our retinas bloom silver spots like beacons. Better than silicone or graphite flesh absorbs the shock of the divine crash-landing. I roll my eyes back, skylights brushed by plumage of detail, the unrehearsed and minuscule, the anecdotal midnight themes of the carbon sea where we are joined: zinnia, tomato, garlic wreaths crowning the compost heap. Olga Broumas
Inception
INCEPTION
She asks,
wants him
to be the first.
As if the other
were a ripened peach,
easily bruised,
they time their movements
to the ancient
pulse of
hearts
then
seas.
Sharp tears through
hidden flesh
steal her breath.
They stop,
begin again,
relentless clock counts towards curfew.
Soothed by his hot sweet breath,
she rests in his embrace—
linear time shifts to the relative distance
between innocence and experience—
she arches,
accepts whispers
fingers
lips
as he eases her through
surmountable pain.
Her chrysalis rips,
new life emerges:
the harsh sun
scent of clary sage
wings drying in a warm breeze.
Thank you to the editors of Hot Flashes: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.
Iris Love
Gram
DREAMING OF GRAM It was the way her eyes rolled as she flashed her pack of cigarettes while I was explaining the impact of environmental illness, as if anyone who acknowledged the body’s needs, who didn’t do what they wanted despite physical limitations, was a whiney little roach as evidenced in her smoking while sporting an oxygen tank for advanced-stage emphysema— I’d had it with the family code of fuck-your-body- till-it-drops exemplified by our matriarch so I got in her emerald eye-shadowed face framed with brilliant orange hair and said: I don’t like you and if you want me to feel anything positive about you when you die, you need to demonstrate a shred of decency now then I stepped to the other side of the bed. Perhaps she rose from where she’d crouched between bed and wall and left, but for me, she disappeared.
Thank you to the editors of riverbabble for first publishing this poem.
America
AMERICA Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand. Claude McKay, 1921 Shenandoah Literary
In This Dream
IN THIS DREAM They’re here! I rip the package, pull sheer stocking over toes, ankle, shin, beyond the line where prosthesis extends my leg. This hosiery will animate prosthetic limbs, transform molded resin into skin, skirts soon fluttering along my thighs as I skip on these feet, attract with these calves, no longer rolling on wheels or hiding my legs from pitying stares. I will be normal. Yet as I examine my stockinged leg, I discover the turquoise seam marking the boundary of prosthesis and flesh. Deformed, dependent, tricked by desperate hope, I fold and cry, knowing I’ll never look or walk like others. Perched on a nearby boulder, my Soul-body marvels at the powerful wings unfurling from between my hunched shoulders, grief shrouding me from their luminous tips as they rise toward the sun.
Thank you to the editors of riverbabble for first publishing this poem.
Lizards In?
ARE THERE LIZARDS IN YOUR FAMILY TREE?
Do you scuttle lithely sand and stone, peek out from rocks through half-shut lids while others' hands are clasped in dance beneath the bone-white crescent slit? Are your eyes autonomous, right darts to lips and left to toes; as softer flesh sips steamed orgeat do you watch the spoon, the ankles cross? Do you begin each day with push-ups then shield yourself from sun in shade; when threatened do your muscles flex, your speech reduce to a chortling hiss? Do others comment, How cold your hands, how dry your skin? Do you dream of grasshoppers sweet in your mouth, or screaming wake from the jaws of a snake?
Thank you to the editor of Something Like Homesickness: A Zapizdat Poetry Anthology for first publishing this poem.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 