Author: poetryfest

Artists never to fail
amaze me with their masterpieces.
May these geniuses continue
to deliver a stunning content.

A stretched breath of linen, hushed and waiting.
Bathed in the fold of the watching sun.
A nail, driven deep by a carpenter’s hand,
Clasps the fabric tender.

No stain, no smudge, no sinning strike,
Only light shifting, soft as a whispered hymn.

In the silence of slow time,
I feel the hands that faced the firmament,
That stretched the dawn within a single breath.
As Michelangelo’s brush met the ceiling of the Chapel,
God’s outstretched hand reached towards Adam.
Oh, what steady love and quiet devotion
Shapes the world in hues of mercy.

The light withdrawals and with it, His voice.
Yet, my hands tremble, painted in ruin-
Crimson, ochre caught in the seams of my skin.

I have tried to love as He does.
Before me, the canvas sighs—
No longer pale, no longer sure,
Now echoing human love:
The reaching, the flawed attempt,
The play we perfect in pretense.

Here, what love has touched, love has altered.
And when the dawn returns,
It will not enter on perfection,
But in what I have made.

a dictum of Jesus

Jesus is a woman I eat up like religion;
spoonful by spoonful, I lick my fingers clean.
She tastes just like the Moon.

Celestial, she hangs suspended over man,
none compare to the Midnight’s Mistress, my mystical muse—
Jesus; a woman I eat up like religion

who rages like a rogue, or just a wafer-thin monsoon?
White-capped waverings over her frosted fingers, sugar in every crevice and crater—
Oh, how she tastes; & just like the Moon,

My eye falls upon sweet Mary, dripping like sand
Slipping through my fingers by some heavenly command,
Jesus. Is a woman I eat up like Religion,

Like Mary, but aching; a horizon filled with gloom?
How she wades through waters and wastelands, searching for an absence;
she tears up, when she’s about to consume,

then we tangle in desperate embraces, shipwrecked vessels enter
the dark spaces of my solitude. At night, the stars remind me that
Jesus is a woman I eat up like religion;
Oh, how she tastes just like the Moon.

I seek him, in all that have entered me.
His scent, His touch that makes me shiver.
I close my eyes to the darkness, I feel him close
His tongue on my neck, his hands grasp at my nipples
They are hard in anticipation
Searing within me is a desire I cannot contain
I lose control, my hands race along his back.
Nails digging into him, in pleasure
He tears my lingerie, to shreds.
He moans in pleasure, “Your mine”
He finds his way into my sweetness
I scream with pleasure.
He grasps at my waist, pulling me towards him.
He whispers “ I need you to grind that pussy on me ”
I whimper with pleasure
I slide on to his cock, slowly
Feeling him all the way inside, deep.
I take him for a ride, my breasts in my hands
Our lips meet, lost in each other.
We are soaked in pleasure.
Looking into his eyes, I know without a doubt in my mind.

I am home

In naïveté the end begins, not knowing it is the last.

When Saigon was collapsing, my parents were separating.
My father had returned from Vietnam and they tried
to make it work but not all of him made it back.
He was haunted by what he saw and had to do
as were other young men drafted to Vietnam despite
being in college, being married, being fathers.

The fall of Saigon had nothing to do with leaves,
but overripe, sweaty, stifling abandonment that
shuttered facilities, ceased resources, made hollow
urgent official broadcasts to remain calm or steadfast
even though store shelves stayed empty while streets
filled with refugees, belongings left piecemeal
in dwellings and alleys. Soldiers, civil servants, allies
clutched their solid-state transistor radios awaiting
the signal to evacuate, while on the U.S. Embassy roof
powerful men swaggered and prepared for flight.

Finally Armed Forces Radio announced
“The temperature in Saigon is 105 and rising”
followed by dead air, the scratch of static,
as the needle dropped on the record
and a beloved culmination of American nostalgia
spun out over the airwaves –

“I’m dreaming of a White Christmas…”

Evacuate like we learned in school, in a line,
hands to ourselves, no squirming, pinching, hitting.
At this point, anticipating lunch, we are our own
hungry children dreading peas from giant cans
opened with industrial equipment, barely warmed.
We are our own soldiers navigating the lunch line
with our milk, our meal, and end up with a place to sit
before dodging spitwads sent hurling through the air
by some grimy kid through his contraband straw. If fortunate,
lunchrooms and playgrounds were our first battle fields.

“Just like the ones I used to know ….”

Evacuate like we presume the words to the song flowed
from Irving Berlin’s pen, as he sat in a desert hotel,
the temperature rising, his thoughts rising
about what we grip tightest, writing the best-selling song
of all time. On the surface, a song about a blanket of snow;
underneath, a song that pounds pure primal nostalgia –
a fantasy about home and childhood that we crave
and never had. Berlin’s memory of life before five:
watching as hungry flames of hatred devoured his family’s home
during an Imperial Russia Pogrom.

“Where the treetops glisten ….”

Evacuate while Saigon collapsed; military aid ceased.
Thousands climbed iron fences; scaled concrete walls;
did things they didn’t know how to do as panic grabbed
Saigon by the neck squeezing with its red grip
and threat of hard labor. Armed Forces Radio
kept playing the song as Marines flew helicopters
back and forth, pulling people off the roof of the U.S. Embassy –
friendships and families made by war. Their eyes sting from
an aroma of certain death in the frequent wind that blows
from each chopper’s blades.

Inhabit like my father and thousands others who
still fight the Vietnam War from their own rooftops.
His line is desperate, unyielding
as sweat runs down his face, pools in his ears,
drips from his nose, soaks his soul.

“… and children listen”

Children waited to be lifted from the roof,
evacuating like they might have learned from a lifetime of war.
They keep their hands to themselves, no squirming, pinching, hitting.
They aren’t listening for sleigh bells; have no nostalgia for snow
at this point, they long to be lifted out of terror;
their thin hands straining to hold on with enough force,

leaving everything they know behind, hoping to end up
with a place to sit or stand, with family
who would look out for them.

A song that asks if we fought for something
we never quite knew.

It starts with a mocking mock
sound of metal clanging on brass.
With flicks of my lethargic fingers
I flip the 2D switches of my alarms.
Good morning, new and improved sunlight!
Thank you for this entrancing menu of options—
What mood shall I start with today?

Perhaps a playlist painstakingly curated just for me?
Existential dread doubtful quarter life crisis Monday morning.
Delightful, but maybe an audiobook, one recommended by
those girl-next-doors engulfing my feed.
Something romantasy with a dose of quirky heroine
and an aftertaste of patriarchal values?
Already checked out on Libby.

I’ll settle for a podcast—my finger finds one
That validates all my self-assigned pathologies.
A disembodied Millennial voice reassures me that
Beauty is mine for the taking, the claiming, the abusing.
But, to my chagrin, I feel no movement in my bones.
No rearrangement of my facial structures
Or resettling of my ribs.

How many inspirational Pins will it take for me to
Wake up one day with pretty privilege?
When will all that filtered perfection seep through the screen
And absorb into my irregularities?
Perhaps they can genetically engineer me to be
Captivating and impossible like a dire wolf—
This I ponder,
As I write an email with words
Suggested by a brainless, heartless, soulless, thoughtless machine.

I have not yet gotten out of bed.

I found God in my backyard,
not in pews on a Sunday morn.
In the cardinal’s cry, orange-beaked, bold,
in earth’s warm pulse beneath bare toes,
in the tang of a rainstorm’s brewing breath.

No dogma spoke His truth to me—
His words hummed soft on the wind,
like my Papaw’s voice, low and kind,
reading tales of hope, of love,
of sacrifice—roses red as grace in the rain.

on July 2022

the hair yellowed, overbleached
the numbing feeling in your teeth,
the biting bruised, the blood beading
the stomach with that sinking feeling

ruminating, retrospectively,
Plastic Beach by Gorillaz on CD
you said i told you so,
this is your innate inability to say no

(i think i could’ve predicted it,
i think my gut had pictured it)

the sub-let studio, semi-illegally so,
the branches bursting through the window
the spray paint fumes, the fibre-glass residue
the mattress on the floor, and you

you and Jesus Christ on a lighter,
and the faux-intimacy of 2CB,
her hair yellowed, over-bleached
her slender limbs like plasticine,
and the things you said, but didn’t mean

Maybe pain is a solitary moment, or rather,
the ink for our perpetual story.

The coming of modernity has wrought
such intellectual cruelty,

where we claim they sent us, only to find fictions
and contradictions,

in lands mentally and physically penetrated by
stunning policies, replacing our identities.

And we chose to believe everything hawked
about building nations;

constructs of self-blinded philosophers,
creating lives more pitiless

and transitory, for the pleasure
of fame and fortune.

Thus, why, too, shall we have eyes?
Is what we saw still worth seeing?

When clearly the inkwell is brimming
with our own complicit blood.

When the light is there
But it’s not as bright
Nobody cares
Or sees your fight

When the light goes out
It can’t come back
This is when people shout
And begin to attack

But where were they
When you screamed in pain
As your light dwindled away
You tried in vain

Despite your tears and cries
No one is there until the light dies