Category: Visual Art

Beyond words and photos

Touch

poem & photo by Elizabeth
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

photo by Elizabeth

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.