Author: poetryfest

Air shot from her lungs;
the swan sunk to the top

.– .- – . .-.

Water, I wish for water,
the way the fish did when they drowned

-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

Coquette, her heart is advertising

.– .- – . .-.

Beauty, pose for swan lake
they’ll love it they’ll log on

-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

Pout so hard your torso has gills

.– .- – . .-.
-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

This is what the screen says
swim woman swim
The (algo)rithm eats away all self from our heads

-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

the world is so fucked

.– .- – . .-.

i
try to shout
“
grab my hand!
hold on
please
WATERS
CONNECT!
“

.– .- – . .-. -.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

Poem 1. The Yield
Born prematurely into selfhood,
before touch, I rehearsed departure.
Those before you taught exits, not entrances—
their lessons carved in absence.

A speculator of affections,
I traded glances for fleeting nearness,
each bond too brittle to hold.
Risk was my currency; staying, a bet I never placed.

An arbitrager between mask and marrow,
I weighed minted lovers, their clinking vows—
love’s value, depreciated at first touch,
a coin worn thin by handling.

Hedged against tenderness,
longing drifts at a floating rate,
need pools darkly, illiquid.
To love and liquidate—the oldest trade.

I am the residue of a sexless schooling—
not Confucian rigor, but parents
who misplaced me in their shadowed nights:
a zombie asset, rotting in dark pools of unspent want.
Textbooks taught systems, not skin—
guilt before pleasure, silence the mother tongue.

OCD’s survivor, I tally sunlit sins,
while your kiss—an iceberg order—
thaws unseen in veins. What is love
where need is moral failure?

Yet I kneel. I suffer. I beg. I believe. Not for worth, but for will.
Not to be remembered, but to endure.
What once broke me calcifies into past.
What once made me scatters toward futures unpriced.

Poem 2. The Floating Rate
Reality cloaks itself in ritual—daily acts, ordinary sights,
veils for light and shadow.
We shroud the dead, close doors,
yet all must pass through.
When reality frays at its edges,
a face—not death’s—peers through:
a fissure, unhedged, where love drifts,
a floating rate tethered to your breath.

I once priced affection like a bond—
fixed term, fixed yield, predictable decay.
But you moved beside me, a risk
no model could tame, only heart could bear.

I watched you sleep—
your shoulder, a soft exchange rate,
your breath, inflationary, spiraling desire
pegged to no anchor but you.
Now I carry you, a volatile asset—
too vital to hold, too alive to hedge.

Poem 3. The Stress Test
I set the city ablaze,
my grimace mirrored in its flames—
a footnote etched across its skyline.
Time buckles as fire laps
the tower’s ticking heart.
In that moment, we are decimal dust.

I kissed you, knowing I was insolvent—
affections over-leveraged,
promises traded beyond my means.
Yet you held me, collateral
no bank would underwrite.

I wake bare from the dream—
morals twitch, paranoid,
restraint gutted by wealth’s excess.
This body, a credit derivative,
unravels in the dark—
a seam-splitting loan, an interest-choked heart.

Our embrace: the terminal stress test,
where the soul declares bankruptcy—
the final audit flashing through my mind:
a ledger of unsent letters, unspoken truths,
and the hands I never held,
already written off as losses.

When I return to the cabin
from picking black berries
barefoot along
the grassy path,
two orange slugs
circle at the foot
of the door frame.
They trail smooth lines
on the rock steps
to the door.
One slug nibbles
on the tail
of the other.
The invitation sticks:
as this migration
dance moves up
the door frame:
these orange partners
lower themselves
dangling by a
single silken thread.
I watch
their twirling dance;
inner phalluses —
emerge & extrude,
the unusually bright
blue skirts —
glowing as they
spoon
joining together
in a flowering
conception.
Then separate;
To fall to the ground
for finding
a hidden space
in the grass
to lay their eggs.

When the world came to be
A voice called out in the darkness
“let there be light”
A prayer, a request, a spark
to begin an eons long project
An ever changing painting of
rolling hills and clouds and
perspective shifts
When I come to a blank page
a word document of cascading
nothingness
I approach in the same way
and clear my throat and speak
through my fingertips
“let there be word”
and I saw, it as good
My soul burns through letters
syllables thoughts feelings
as prose becomes poem
and my world knits itself together
into an afghan of myself
Wound tightly on the page
It is through this act of creation
that I play the role of benevolent god
and expose the facets of mind, matter
to the mirror of the universe
I gain worshippers, gain dissent
and become a force of nature
a fearsome feminine storm
unleashing the joy, the sensual,
the darkness and horrors
and everything about me
in a way that is palatable
digestible in words, in verse
Ready to be set to the lyre
And sung to every corner
Can you see me, now? Can you
believe in me? or should I begin
my services, my worship through
words again?
I’ll open to a new page, a new chapter,
and begin again with “let there be words”

audrey hepburn hangs up her hat
and takes off her pearls
She shucks her gloves finger by finger as
she moves to unzip her dress
The fabric of the little black number
falls to the ground around her
and her curves are met with the
chill of an air-conditioned apartment
And she sighs, her skin alert with
tiny bumps of residual anticipation
as she grabs a Red Bull from the fridge

Breakfast has passed and Tiffany is gone
and her dreams have vanished before her
like the smoke at the end of her cigarette
A jolt of caffeine at least brings her mind
out of the chasm it had fallen in
The swamp of disappointment that she
lost her heels in, that sticky, mucky place
Those Diors will not pass through her doors
Her Chanel will not be channeled
She can’t give any more to Givenchy
She is just she

Not the muse, the icon, the aesthetic
she craved, that she had imagined herself
She is on the outside of that wild world
The room where it happens that she
tried to claw herself into with stiletto nails
Her fingers are now nubby, covered in paint and
grime and nothing as exquisite as stone

Let go of the dreams, darling, let go
of the notion that you need to be a
poster, an image reposted on Pinterest
the theme of a twenty-first birthday
The sunglasses are no longer needed
to block out the bright future ahead
Because you already have what you
thought you needed.

The stitches of your limbs, the fabric
of your body hair and the button
of your nose, the epaulettes of your
fingernails, the brushes of your lashes
are the height of fashion
It is within you, ms. hepburn, in every
breath you take, each wrinkle and
drape of curve against frame

You are not a snapshot, but rather,
a flame, the lit end, a runway walk
You are not black and white, darling,
you are color
So, live it and use it

“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last.” ~ Achilles, Troy.

they said the gods once pointed out atmosphere,
days, imagination & then, they created love.
“a sturdy object, love” they said.

then they created poets since poems
compose conundrums & sympathize
themselves into selves, never bare

of moments, of mercies, & the problem
horizons caused by endings like impassable
boulders.

& yet, they had no answers for her. no answers
for her dying way too young. to them, she
was nothing more than a decorative piece.

but to me, she captured daylight, just like the gods,
but maybe that was the problem? maybe it was
jealousy? so they worked slowly, stripping away at her

because the gods always work slowly when they want
to maximize the pain & agony. distant, shadowy, & always
working backwards, unfolding the ruins

of history – all of it like some strange fairy tale
titled, “the small regret that is the human body.”
but i ask you, dear reader: are humans just bodies?

no. we’re homes. we’re voices in almost-vibrant
Kodachrome. the loft of our voices bringing
us relief & because of this, we grow to love

this new body part. in this new fairy tale separate
from the gods where a clock never ticks its incoherent
code in the background, cramping all the air

inside the room. why couldn’t the gods
gift us two instead of one, like hearts?
why when their ears ring with our cries

do they not respond, “we hear you”?
it’s only then we notice they want us to look
at them, catch them in the corners of our

eyes, the way you’d look at a man holding
a gun at your temple. that’s when we turn gray-ish
like fingerprint dusting powder.

can’t you see, dear reader? it’s only then we
realize this fairy tale, our lives, that it’s not about embracing.
them. it’s about embracing ourselves, embracing each other,

embracing time, embracing one’s death in those eyes,
those envious eyes of the gods, & never wanting to escape
one’s self or each other because the ticking, that ticking

you still hear, no matter what of that ticking, if you keep
listening to it the way the gods listen to our heartbeats,
too closely, you’ll realize that ticking all along

came from a bomb strapped to our bodies
given to us by the gods.

from the poem Half Japanese Buddhist Daughter: A Poem of Love to Mother
by Francesca Biller

Every mother’s story is a story of need:
theirs, hers, the household’s, the great world’s.
Her imagination has been her worst fail:
chimerical visions of danger, misdeed,

fright, illness, grief. Her body has not sufficed,
her love has not been enough (important people
told her this). Her understanding and patience
failed. Her parenting style was a poltergeist

at best, malarial at its worst. Every
memory aches with her wrongdoing. God or
the universe or her own mother let her
know beyond all knowing (this in reverie)

what she ought to have been and what she was not.
She read the books the experts wrote, listened to
what the speakers spoke, purchased and heard the tapes,
kept the appointments, permitted everything..

The struggle to believe, the deconstruction on
the road to wisdom was the road she followed;
the signs were painted by all the mothers she
ever knew. They pointed just one direction:

See the sign. The pop-art finger shows one path:
This Way In. This Way Out. Beware of Quicksand.
All Damages Paid At the End of this road.
All Sins Confirmed By Your Offsprings’ Frozen Wrath.

Our words collide and tangle midair
Swallow them down like cough syrup
Breathe in your sweetness once again,

Curl up so close to each other,
Somehow never close enough
And nothing will ever soothe it,

The soft humming of my chest
But you make my mind so quiet
I can almost begin to think

Tongue fizzling as I give you my soul
I’ll watch your face as it happens
Watch those soft eyes go dull

Mind slipping further and further
‘Til there’s a million miles between us
So I’ll reach out, try to grab you

Pull your head above the water
I’ll never understand, that place you go
But it’s far away from where I am

And I’ll reel you back in every universe

In the last part of that time of dusk
when shadows meet the first departure of light.
over three fingers of the river
a Great Blue Heron performed an aerial pirouette.

Down with wisped blue gray feathers braking air
and into one side of a small island,
a fan of tail, a wing dipping
and to the other side,
where eddies and small pools
held more frogs and minnows,
only to see a man fly casting and then
beat wings hard, around, and again upward
through reddened light–down river.

That moment, bare, infinite,
myself standing in sand,
exchanging cigarettes & amenities
with another fisherman,
whose back is turned upstream
to the sound of faster water
I could not call his attention to this sight
and continued our conversation, with the sound
of river as chorus–I remembered the long legs
of a woman I had met the night before, as
gray blue wings passed
slow and noiseless over our heads.

She’s diseased and afflicted
she must be hurting, bet she’ll kick this
my toes are all stubbed
and bloodied up
but I still have this sickness
spit it out, choke it down
but i’ve only been a witness
I promised him I wasn’t this
but she whispered in my ear
and I felt my traitor heart pitch
down into my stomach, god
how am I gonna stomach this
it lurks in my mind like
a stalker on a wanted list
asking what that lump is
lodged in my esophogus
if this is what you’re gonna be
expect it to be gutsy
spit it out, choke it down
which one is it gonna be