
…bring you joy?
Poems, Prose, Photos & the Art of Being Human
poetry, writing, novel, yoga, restorative yoga, improv, near death, asthma, hope, social imbalance

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.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Harry S. Truman


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