Author: poetryfest

“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

2025 , rent’s a war I lose,
Check come in, disappear like news.
Boss got bots, I mop the floor,
Work three shifts just to stay poor.

Cameras blink like they know my soul,
Street got eyes, but none got goals.
Cops wear masks, still smell like fear,
Freedom’s fake when they’re always near.

Scroll past pain, it loop, it rot,
Grind so hard I forget what’s not.
Sleep when dead? That quote feel true,
We ghost ourselves just to push on through.

Love’s a glitch, and touch don’t last,
Text replaces a question asked.
Raised on reels, kids numb too fast,
The screen’s their god, the feed’s their past.

But I stay loud, with pen like blade,
Write my rage where scars got made.
World on fire, I breathe that smoke,
I won’t break, but I might go broke.

Masculinity – noun
“the social roles, attitudes, and expectations considered
appropriate for men”

The idea of a man is a construction
Built from ever-lasting empires
Forged into iron swords and shields to
withstand all battles
They are created strong and protective
Masculinity is their cloak, their armor
And I know I was not clothed with the same fabric

Where a man’s skin is metal, mine is wooden
Nicked and scrapped
Shaped easily
The more curves I gain,
My figure is seen as – less
A puppet, strung on a stage
For your viewing
For your convenience
Because who I am can not be understood easily
But I’m not some piece of wood
or a puppet
Once you know me, you’ll see
I’m a human
I’m a boy

A boy with the hips of a dancer
Hugging dresses with childhood joy.
Heels tapping away to the sound of songs.
Wearing makeup because he likes to look pretty
I am a boy who ties his hair back,
wishing it was shorter
messy, in a handsome kind of way
A boy who is alienated,
because masculinity is not a blanket I wear
Not an image I express often

Sometimes, by choice
But other times by force
An inner war where trying to comply is easier,
than following the steps of those fighting the same demons,
The same perpetrators,
The same mirrors,
telling us we are wrong,
That I – was made – wrong

They preach it so easily,
To my face, in my ear
Caring not for how their comments cut my skin.
Every uttered “she” or “girl”
Becoming knives digging into wood,
Cracking the façade.
no matter how much I try,
They will never believe I am a real boy.

Those who do,
will tell me I must change.
Preaching it will ONLY take scars
It will ONLY take drugs injected into my muscle
That will BLEED from my palms
Shed from my mangled chest

Spill from my guts

I have – to be rough around the edges
Revoke the vulnerability – that womanhood
Has woven into my form.
Be cold at heart, fall in line with the system.
To survive and avoid harm at the hands of oppression,
I MUST become the IMAGE of the oppressor.

I can only ever “want” to be a boy,
never actually be seen as one.
I’ll never wield the metal they carry
Or be built from empires
Or be cloaked with the same armor
Society has not built me

Which is why I’m building myself.
My own wood stronger and flexible, shaped to my desire.
I will build my empire
I will open my heart,
That bleeds the kindness shunned by others
That sheds the tears forbidden for others
I am not a puppet but this is MY stage
And I’ll let out my voice and say
I am a real boy

with a big chest and bigger heart
A boy who likes playing guitar at night,
a boy who likes books where people like him
get their promised happy endings
And I’m a boy who gets stressed,
and happy
And emotional.

But before all of that,
I am a person.
My boyhood is not exclusive to my humanity.
And nothing you say, or think,
Could ever change that

We’ve met before,
when the sea was still young,
and we were salt dissolving into it,
dissolving into each other,
learning the delicate, hesitant
art of vanishing.

And again, as birds,
fragile, trembling,
realizing, too late, that sometimes
the difference between flying and falling
is only the sound of the wind in our ears.
That the rush in our chests
might feel like a high,
but Icarus, too, was laughing
before he hit the ground.

We’ve met as you and I,
in some other lifetimes,
where I watched you stake your lovers,
bodies layered like stones upon stones,
as to raise the height of some anonymous,
unreachable mountains,
that no one will ever climb, but you.
Returning with the devotion of a pilgrim,
who believes ruins might reveal a path.
And I forgave.

We shared some lives
washing fruits, folding shirts,
losing coins in the gaps of the sofas,
making vows, breaking them,
tending to each other’s dying parents;
while the fire of our ordinary gestures
burned louder than the passion of others.

We were never strangers
and yet, sometimes,
I looked for someone’s else arms
to feel like a kind of death postponed.

We are planets that have been colliding
for thousands of years.
Surfaces cracked, continents broken,
oceans evaporated into dust.
Meeting time and time again in the dark,
while we mistake the tremor of an impact
for the tenderness of a touch.
Every orbit a repetition of fate,
our gravity pulling us to endings
we mistake for beginnings.

Twenty years after
It first premiered,
I started watching
Rome, the series

Not for historical value,
Or the drama,
Or the sex,
But on account of a recommendation

Of course, all of the above are present
The bloody dictatorship,
The glamor of Cleopatra,
The shiny golden coins

Life then felt brutal but honest
And as Pompey Magnus stared off
toward the coast of Greece,
foreseeing his defeat, and lamented,
“Oh, to be a slave, how restful it must be.”

Either you were someone’s pawn
Or you were playing a dangerous game of chess
To be noble or a man of power in those days often meant
A literal fight to the death

Though today, we have plenty of other problems
They are just packaged up in different paper

While many things could be better, namely
Climate chaos
Human rights
Famine
Water shortages
Raging wars
Xenophia

At least I am less likely to be murdered by a power-hungry friend
Screaming “Et tu, Brute?” in the end
And for that, I am grateful to be
Alive in 2025

He planted flowers in her lungs
now she couldn’t breathe
for fear of their stems snapping in the wind
Holy hypoxia

The crown of thorns sat comfortably upon her
The flesh of her scalp was the perfect sheath for its barbs

In her liver grew fields of wheat and persimmon trees
His cattle grazed on the grassy plains of her face
The children grew in her heart[land]
And grapevines twined like tendrils of smoke around her ribs
Safe from what would happen later

soon her bones will be hollow
At least there might be an public housing project
For his disciples
In the encystment

her veins were swollen beneath
the water they now send alongside blood
To keep his plants, and children, alive

the question is
was mothering in – his
nature