elusive as birth this soft wily reptile rises but a day sun's heat sea's songs wind's swirls till serene it transforms to shore
Sand Tortoise
Category: Visual Art
Beyond words and photos
Graffito
GRAFFITO Three distinct letters, discrete as whispers yet stark as sunrise, stain this park’s concrete wall. S insinuates the dark entrance, secret from those passwordless, but once in, one snakes along this sinuous passage toward E, which sighs like a wind-filled cavern in the fold of a word so bare it exposes the language of pores opening like stomata along nerve-laden skin, of tongues probing tasting moistening unveiling revealing the voracious pulse and press of pelvis belly even neck, bared for the thin membrane of skin, primordial as sound rising from ancestral marrow formed of molten rock and sky-filled sea before X marks the space within and between.
Thank you to the editors of HOT FLASHES: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.
Sweetness
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~
Neighbors
When a neighbor wrote this on the sidewalk in 2020, I felt it in grey…
yet, in 2023, I feel the optimism that my neighbor’s color choice conveys. I continue hoping “BETTER” for so many more, in so many more ways that anyone might have imagined three years ago.
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.
Forgiveness
Peace & Joy!
May this season and 2023 bring you all the Love, Peace, Happiness, Resilience and immeasurable Beauty that Life offers.
Will doing this
…bring you joy?
Haikus
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.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 