Trespassing
Graffiti
“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.”
Originally shared on Random People Quotes Project.
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.
Reborn
I was startled to see this cicada emerge from its “skin” on our outdoor chair at the beginning of the proliferation of cicadas that spread through the United States in 2021.
Memory
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Maya Angelou
Great Legs!
Evolution
Evolution taught us to survive, not to understand how the universe works.
Sundog
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 