New Poem in the Rockvale Review

My deep thanks to Sandy Coomer, founding editor of the Rockvale Review for publishing my poem “Bloom.” From their website:

“We like writers – new, emerging, and established. And we like writing– all forms, all subject matters. Send us short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction you hold close beside you, what you carry with you into sleep and wake up with in the morning. Send us writing that is hard-edged and finely crafted, but can reach beyond the skin to the flesh beneath. Send us solid, tough language – the rock of this human experience, and send us fluid, supple images – the vale of this human existence. Do both in the same piece.”

Atoms

Cells die, but not the hundred trillion atoms
within each one–they’ve been around
since the stars were born and will be here ever after.
Even a body gone up in smoke does not lose a single atom.
Skin, blood, bones turn to water, gas, minerals.
So widely are atoms recycled that a billion of our own
once belonged to Shakespeare.

Knowing this helps.
Now that you are gone
you could be anywhere:
inside a red maple leaf,
or the twitching tail of a tadpole,
in the taste of a honeydew melon,
in the sigh of a thousand strangers,
in the hollow you left within my arms.


This poem was originally published by Minnow Literary Review.

The Cost

You came to me in a dream,
as the dead sometimes do,
and my joy rushed out to meet you.
I remember how your brown eyes held me
while, finally have the chance,
I said what I needed to say.

I must have looked away,
given you just enough time
to leave me.
I knew that you had died again
and that the cost was fair.

New Poem in Star 82 Review

Many thanks to editor Alisa Golden for publishing “A Christmas Poem” in the new issue of Star 82 Review. 

“Star 82 Review is an independent art and literature, online and print magazine that highlights words and images in gemlike forms. Each issue features flash fiction, creative nonfiction, erasure texts, narrative art, postcard lit and poetic storytelling featuring subtle humor, humility and humanity, the strange and the familiar, and hope.”

Write A Letter

Write a letter to your younger self,
they urge: It’s cathartic.
Be kind, be supportive,
guide her gently toward better choices.
Fat chance she’d listen.
Pearls of wisdom, cautionary tales–she heard them all.
And what, precisely, to offer?
Don’t settle? Don’t worry? Stay out of the sun?
I wouldn’t listen to me either.
If I took another tack,
told her she was strong
and worthy, capable of anything,
she’d only shrug and look away.
Not for a minute would she have imagined
a soft landing in her sixties,
four-bed/two bath, a steadfast spouse.
In any case, who am I to interfere–
she got me this far, didn’t she?
Better to leave her hurtling
into plight and fervor and folly
so that she can show up here
and astonish me.
“See?” she would have said.

Lichen

Bonded to a boulder,
living on air and random rain,
a forty-year-old lichen
claims a thumbprint of space.
Centuries from now it will be
the size of a dinner plate,
will still be young
when the millennium turns–
not that age applies
to a thing designed to override death.

Maybe this doesn’t sound
like much of a life:
stuck on stone, nothing to do
but make more crust.
Or maybe it’s a thrill a minute,
living up to all that potential.

I would like to find out,
to lie on a sun-warmed rock
and give myself up,
to become with steady assurance
all I was ever meant to be.


























 

 

 



What Thrills Me About The Deep Red South

Surging dolphins.

Ospreys carrying dinner.

Fried shrimp picnics on the banks of a bayou.

Box turtles crossing the yard.

Tree frogs on the window pane.

Corn snakes in the squash.

The size of grasshoppers.

How tall my basil grows.

The end of summer.

And the Make America Green Again 

bumper sticker I saw yesterday 

on a car whose driver I’d pay to meet.