Author: poetryfest

Would you like to dance?
I could sing your name out slowly
Je-
Mi-
Mah
Lullaby loosely word that reminds me
Of syrup
I mean clearly the marketers knew what they were doing
Because your name still sounds like a poem to me

A deep southern love song
A windy romance

Would you show me the hills?
Walk me up and down
Je-
Mi-
Mah
Weaving through pathways like crochet
Slowly
Until the day fades into stardust
Until the scent grows sweet with the coming dew

I don’t care what colour you are
I care what sunset you bring to your eyes in the morning
And the cadences of your
Laughter

You could sing to me in yellow

Would you want to breathe?
A cathartic huh, huh, huh
Je-
Mi-
Ma
Mah
Muh
Uh
Uh

Uh

Jerimiah was a bullfrog
But you are beautiful
They have not copyrighted your smile
Nor have they formulated your recipe

But I bet I could memorize your walk
I bet I could sell your scent
If you ever gave me the rights

Romeo was a lover
But I’m sure on someone else that name fits like
A ripped pair of jeans

I think Juliet was right

I cannot imagine you anyone else
Anywhere else
Anybody else

Would you smile at me?
I could ease your awkward tendencies
Je-
Mi-
Mah
Oscillating violin strings
Slow moan

I mean you make me want to make you sing
But you keep your perfect mouth closed

Some locks don’t have a key

My garden is a wild tangle of intention and accident—a soft rebellion blooming between the clipped borders of my neighborhood. It’s a quiet refusal to control what was never meant to be tamed. Here, amidst the milkweed and dandelions, I began tending not just soil, but something unkempt and yearning inside myself.

One afternoon, while pressing a hand-painted sign into the warm soil beside a patch of clover, my neighbor, Mr. Thompson, leaned over the fence.

“You know,” he called, half teasing, “I always thought you didn’t have a green thumb.”

I smiled and glanced around—dandelions flickering like tiny suns among the leaves.

“Maybe not for proper gardens,” I said, brushing dirt from my hands. “But for this kind? I do just fine.”

He stepped closer, eyes catching the words on my signs. Milkweed – Monarch butterfly haven. Dandelions – Not just weeds, but tea for the soul. His brow furrowed, then softened. “Never thought of it like that.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “We’re so busy trimming and taming nature into what we think it
should be, we miss the beauty in simply letting it be. Dandelion tea is my favorite. It’s like
sipping a bit of the garden’s spirit.”

Peaches, my ginger cat, strolled out from the undergrowth, her tail held high. She moved like a whisper through the clover and herbs, perfectly at home. A creature born for freedom. “She seems to like it,” he said, watching her with new eyes.

“She does. Cats remember something we tend to forget—the grace of not being controlled.” He didn’t speak for a moment, just nodded slowly.

“Maybe there’s something to that. Letting things be…”

Then a sudden rustle—a young deer darted across the path, chasing a butterfly that spun like a drifting seed. Mr. Thompson gasped, caught off guard.

“Never seen that in my yard,” he murmured.

The garden exhaled around us—mint, jasmine, the grounding scent of dandelion roots. The sun’s heat loosened its grip, and the breeze began to cool like a sigh. Birds tuned the hush with their evening songs, and the leaves joined in with their own kind of applause.

Later, as I watered the ferns, his words lingered. Each plant in my garden, from the humble dandelion to the defiant milkweed, whispered a truth I’d come to cherish: you don’t have to be tamed to be beautiful.

I used to believe I was a poor gardener—because I couldn’t shape roses or train vines. But it wasn’t my garden that was wrong. I just hadn’t yet learned what kind of garden was right for me. As the sun lowered itself behind the trees, casting long amber shadows across the uneven beds, I sank onto my old bench. Peaches curled beside me with a sigh, her purring folding into the quiet around us. The garden hummed—not neat, not silent, but alive in all the right ways.

This isn’t just gardening. It’s rewilding—of soil, of soul. A quiet revolt against control, and a return to something truer, older, mine.

A special place is where I sit,
A seat made just for me.
A seat I earned, but never wanted,
While quietly mourning what should be

I take my place in the chair,
It cannot possibly be meant for me.
I sense the eyes of onlookers
While I feel nothing, but grief

They feel something different,
As if they lost a prize.
They fume in the backseat they earned,
While I slump down in mine.

I would give up my seat if I could
I would happily take any other.
But this seat is something I earned
Through the love of another

Now her casket lay closed in front of me
And my phone buzzes in my bag
The salt of my tears sting my lips
As I look to my right and see the face of a sister she once had

Those behind me wonder who I am
And wonder how I earned my spot
Not many sit front row at a funeral
And I’ll tell ya, it takes a lot

So please, don’t waste your time
Pretending to know the dead
Because my best friend is in there
And I know she would be seeing red

Because if you look to the screen above,
You’ll see photos of her with me
For I earned my seat,
You got yours for free

A special place is where I sit
A seat made just for me
Because to sit in the front row,
Means you have a front row ticket for Grief

You scattered the pieces across the table,
Searched for edges, assembled the frame.
In silence, I stole a center piece,
Hid it in my pocket,
Waiting for you to notice
The void within the puzzle,

And in that moment,
Recall the culprit of the incomplete image –
Perhaps seek out the thief.

Time passed on:
Seagulls over the ocean?
Wolves in their dens?
Flowers in a garden?
Something white…

She left, seeking the piece of him
She once loved,
Hoping to find it
In the spaces between,
The quiet theft,
A piece of him in her search.

Through my days and years,
I carried the uncertainty
Of what drove her away:
The wing tip of a bird?
The tooth of a wolf?
The water bead on the stem of a leaf?
Something elusive…

Wherever geometry shaped itself,
Whoever flashed a color of the form,
I sought the complete image,
Unaware that within me
Lay the missing piece.

Peripheral blurs intercepted my vision,
Shaped into clear forms:
A scarf fluttering,
A flower blooming,
Shadowed trees standing still.

Faithful to remembrance,
To keep a piece of you within me,
Or a vision of me within your search.

Could the worn edges of one of a thousand
Preserve the desire to sustain the man you knew,
One shape shy, dampened by a wish for the whole?
You who knew me more in absence,
Traced the contours of my theft,
Mapped the waters of the irresolute island,
Where my reflection,
Incomplete,
Withheld the whole.

And in that quiet revelation,
Found the missing piece within,
Binding the fragments of our puzzle,
In the search for what remained unseen.

Like a deep dark river
wandering through a canal

Do you know what you are?
Do you see what I’m seeing?

Oh, bluebrown gal –
you are all that has been

Eased you rest
as robin eggs
in a mother’s snug nest

Oh, bluebrown gal –
I call & I hear your sweet gest

like waves stiff
rising & crashing against weathered cliffs

Oh, bluebrown gal –
you’re everywhere & it

Your eyes of pale aquamarine
are slivers of your soul peering
into physicality –
– settled squarely in frame,
your hair – dark brown mahogany

Oh, bluebrown gal;

Two staples of nature:
the sea & the ground
perfected on you
reflected around

She does not appear in my dreams, I simply dream of her.
I stare at mountains and see her face in their contours.

Before slumber, I pull her from my desk drawers and paint her across me. I trace the edges of her head with the outline of my shoulder. I colour the hue of her skin with the coldness of my empty bed. I hum her playful jests as working tunes. I give her an embellished title before mounting her above the headboard.

Her hair sways across her shoulders as trees
And her smile peaks through her stubborn gaze.
Her doe eyes coat me in bewilderment such that
Her blinks return me to reality in my empty apartment.
I pray she looks at me. My pleas to God interrupt her speech from entering my ears. The Freshness of air in her sight makes the city smog sit longer in my lungs. She is bathed in Sunshine, the same rays which narrowly avoid my skin.
The sharp ringing of her laughter in my ears distracts from the endless silent nights.

In my sleep, I dream of the days when I saw her.
My heart palpitates at every breath she ushered: every instance her chest subtly brought closer
To mine.
In reminder of how my heart could behave, I have forgotten how it usually sounds. Does it flutter with the same intensity? Does its buzzing have such high a frequency?
Do I too carry the whimsy of a hummingbird that I should now have its heart?
The joy of her presence tugs at my skin as the sun above her head roasts me alive.
She holds my withered body with the graciousness of the grass below her.
I faintly see the swirl of flowers through blurred eyes.

I wake in a hospital bed with IVs like wires fueling a machine.
Skin wet from morning dew. White bandages covered in green mushy blurs. My skin burning like still on fire.
The doctor’s voice pierces the haze of hysteria. I was found unconscious in the forest.
I return to my city apartment basked in a pale blue dimness.
I stare at the painting above my headboard of a tree in a shrine of light.

Ye sweet and beautiful woman,

your face inspires a once battered-down man to feel his own self again.

Your stare causes the soul to feel bare against your very presence.

Symmetry makes you; sweetness is what you share.

Your lips invite somebody to meet them and thus place theirs upon thine.

You are a muse to the eyes and a velvety rose to the soul. With no trace of effort, one can feel warm when you come to
form.

Words cannot express what the heart feels when I see you. Words are every person’s company when mumbling makes its
appearance.

Still, words do not suffice to make you aware how much I miss the smell of yours, the sight of your beautiful face, the warmth and touch of your body.

Oh ye, goddess of the earth! Show me your care, for I love you

with my whole self.

* Inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.

On broken wing,
I turn in circles,
rhythmically repetitive,
lost in clouded notions,
a ghost puppet bird
clasped by a mariner’s mind:
one that is doomed, misjudging,
all too ready to dispense death,
brandishing a shotgun
in ancient-thinking hands.

I tried to help,
guide his crew to safety,
finding free passage:
an aerial guide
in times of tumultuous tides,
yet, I paid a fine,
the highest price
for libertine wings.

Shot, barely buoyant,
I try to cling on
to a ring of life
buoying me skyward,
but it turned –
oil-slick –
too slippery to anchor
with no land, rock or perch
or awaiting saviour
flying a flag of avian victory.

Only blood-red rivers
wave beneath my feathers.

I am cursed,
maimed my man,
exploited then broken
by his greedy clutch:
taking too much
when giving nothing,
no coins to Mother Nature,
to pay his sea voyage.

Now, in dusky shade,
I hang around his neck,
an inverted Christ,
a crucifix of despair,
bearing blighted pearls.

A long,
sad,
white
tear.

I stand beside you on Lesbos,
drenched in stories of desire and death,
the ancient Aegean—woven in byssus, eternal and gleaming—
a thread that binds us across time.

I touch the inside of your marble wrist, still so smooth,
untainted by lecherous strokes,
and I feel your pulse quickening—
as if you see me, as if you know me,
as if the tips of my callused fingers
can still awaken something beneath the stone.

Poetry surges through the air,
marble lips exhale,
and your gaze, oh your gaze,
turns to me, only me.

The sky burns violet,
Weary winds untie my hair with porcelain fingers.
I wonder if this is how you saw her,
bathed in the last flush of daylight,
her mouth still wet from your kiss.

Is this how she sighed?
With your words coursing through her body,
with the weight of your hunger pressed into her breasts?
Did your voice curl at the base of her spine,
settling heavy between her thighs?

Gossamer moonbeams glide over my skin like vicuña,
and here I am, centuries away,
wanting you the way you wanted her.

I remember you
in the future.

Oh, Sappho! Goddess, infernal lover,

Ruin me.
Consume me.
Let me drink in
Your overwhelming heartbreak.

A Jesus Christ Rat just came up to me
He asked if I’d like a cup of tea
I said no and he called me a hoe
I guess thats just how these things go

I saw him again down in Tumbuktu
I had no clue what I was to do
He said Here son, now dont you see
You got to try summa my special tea

Nowhere else will you find as good a brew
Made from the cleanest flowers blue
Fine I said I’ll bite that hook
And a cuppa his special tea I took

Well I woke up in a world of green and blue
Very far from Timbuktu
And I shouted at him the fuck did you do?
He said I freed your mind
You bit the hook and I pulled the line
And brought you to the land of the three headed shrine

There we met the god of tounges
Who colored the air coming out of my lungs
It said since your here come with me
And took us where the sky meets the sea

We stayed there a few hours more
Learning what was beyond the door
Truths that I cannot say
For they would melt your brain away

I suddenly woke as if from a dream
The rat nowhere to be seen
Where he went I’lkl never know
I guess thats just how these things go

——
Atticus Eaton is a poet and author who has been previously had a short story published in
Asheville NC’s Mtn. Xpress. He is 15 years old and goes to Asheville High School