Author: poetryfest

1. Walking one day by a cafe, I heard your lyrical laugh
2. Your voice caught my attention to so rich and deeply resonating
3. I had to stop to take one look around and asked one of the staff
4. Your name and if you were local, for whom you seemed to be waiting
5. No name given and not a local was the reply, you waited for no other
6. I had to know your name, engage you in a bit of chatter, I felt so drawn
7. When I came upon you, said hello and saw your face, I cold not speak further
8. I knew, my heart and soul as well, this was no simple liaison
9. Asking if the seat was taken, I looked in your eyes and found my world there
10. Those eyes I’d seen a hundred times, but in my dreams, before me
11. You welcomed me and gave a smile, my heart leapt in my chest, I had no air
12. I’d never felt such pull, such hope and need so close and not to this degree
13. Introductions made, we began to converse and life suddenly felt completed
14. We ordered food and drink, spent hours getting acquainted well
15. My thoughts began to wander to our future, my life, her life accreted
16. All too soon the meal ended, the conversation dwindled, she rose to say farewell
17. I asked her number and where she stayed and she shared the information
18. My soul’s mate left and walked away, me eager to see her once more
19. Evening fell, my heart did ache, needed to see her before the end of her vacation
20. Was this a passing fancy, desperate need, destined love, I wanted to explore
21. I rang her line and she picked up and I asked her to come out
22. The object of my heart, sadly declined, said she had commitments
23. She’d leave next day, needed to pack and had no time to mill about
24. My soul cried out, as hopes and dreams began to die in this predicament
25. I asked her if she felt what was between us, she said she did indeed
26. She could not just leave to be with me, it did not seem to her to be wise
27. Then tears began to fall on the call and we felt desperately in need
28. To find ones mate, then have it torn away, I’d found a gift and she her prize
29. She touched my soul and made my life whole without her there’d be no hope
30. Yet she could not just stay and I understood, she’d need to go back home
31. Running to her, I knocked on the door, got on one knee and asked her to elope
32. She gasped as tears fell from her eyes, we both had known our meeting was not random

The sun used to make you happy
You squinted toward the sky, cheeks reddening as we waited
You laid on your towel, baking on hot concrete
While we sheltered under umbrellas
You stripped off your clothes and bounded into the pool
Not a care in the world
What happened?
Your world became brown and gray
You don’t see the yellow and pink and forest green
The sun now means sweat
And tired
A broken air conditioner and a hot car
If you tell me what changed, I’ll do anything to fix it
Has the sun dimmed?
I’ll buy you a house with a pool and a big soft towel to lay on
Is it too strong?
I’ll buy you sunscreen
And a floppy hat
The sun hasn’t moved
Or changed
It’s still in the sky
Lighting billions of faces
Warming skin
Come on
Get up
Please come outside
I’ll show you the sun

Itty Bitty
I exhale all of the air
from my tired lungs.
There hangs before me
a tropical beach scene
smattered on white gathered fabric.
What hangs before me is the mysterious
“String bikini”
This is made evident by the barely there
fabric held on by a prayer with
strings impossibly small
that makes me question
the engineering feat of holding
such an ensemble together.
I gather the offending garments
with a small glimmer of hope
peeking out from under my strappy
black blouse.
The strappy white fabric
with its tasteful tropical beach scene
does not give me the appearance
of beach broad’s bodies of bygone eras.
It barely hangs onto my breasts
now threatening to bust from the front
like a haphazard can of biscuits.
I move to the side suddenly,
which causes my breast to fall out
like a reluctant Madonna.
A voice festering in my skull
shouts out, “put that damn thing away!”
No, this offensive garment will not do.
The bottoms are next to come.
My apron belly proudly drapes over
the impossibly small fabric,
swallowing any vision
of the beach scene.
I giggle at the thought
of being chased down the beach,
loudly shouting “I swear, officer, I’m clothed!”.
This ensemble will not do.
Maybe in another life
will I take the risk of being cited
for public indecency.
Which is something I’m convinced
was made up by skinny people.

This heartbreak could teach me how to live
If I let it
I feel the pull to make something new of my life
The quick draw of every direction
All screaming TRIUMPH! DIFFERENTIATION!

I sit and watch
The wind comb through the branches of the trees
My storytellers stop to listen
No one is watching me
There is nothing to do, no more to be

Doing nothing doesn’t mean
That nothing is happening

What now should I give my deepest attention to?

My breath rises in my body
I am returned to me, and there’s nothing to escape
This was always the point:
To stay
To polish the pain
Until I can see my own reflection

(the alchemist)
CNM
@tender.badass

S-A-L-V-A-T-O-R-E,
the kind of name that flushes the sour out
of the mouth as you speak it.

So Italian and pedigreed,
it soaked his organism into animation.

14K gold tokens of Mary and Joseph
wrapped around his neck,
clanking like a catholic drum.

The “ka-ding” sound, I thought,
could be the last breath of my father’s,
rolled over, preserved,
a finger trip or two away
from the heart still beating in Salvatore.

I watched him drift into my ghost,
to a skeleton home, a hospital bed. Gone,
I watched the years melt
like a thin stream of condensation
for everything that was not.

His Old Spice stains the air—
the particles rattle quietly
inside my lungs, breath churning
like ocean’s milk,
a domesticated residue to prove
he was ever there.

Each day, all day, she sleeps in her hospital bed. She gets up briefly for meals. With trembling hand, she raises food from dish to lips, the climb of small portions, the descent of slow, slow chew.

She breathes, chest rising and falling under the blue woven blanket. I stare at her timeworn face crowning the bedclothes. She still has all her own teeth, focal points between parted lips. How much longer can she live? I love Ev, my stepmother. She will be cremated.

So was my mother. I paid $100 dollars extra to have her ashes strewn over the Atlantic Ocean, to afford her a moment of freedom, a release from her painful life. She gave birth to a son who died in infancy and lost an old boy, Daddy, who divorced and stigmatized her, made her a freak among wives of linotype operators and and New York Post deliverymen who didn’t know from divorce.

I revisit Ma’s sullied mothering. She was busy, busy with classes in interior decorating and painting. She cooked breast of chicken divan for stoop shouldered, big-bellied boyfriends that moved like slugs, with similarly paced intellectual capacity. I dusted our furniture, did the wash, and made our beds. One day I stamped my foot down on the wine colored carpet I vacuumed. I declared, one job a day, the blooming of my teenage rebellion that lasted her lifetime.

Ev escaped the wrath I loudmouthed at Ma, but she too was my victim. She confiscated my Daddy so I had to get even, dragging disquiet in my overnight bag when I visited on weekends. I released miasmic vapors into the nooks and crannies of what I perceived as happy suburban life.

This woman I have come to love after years of battles and truces will soon leave me behind.

In my mind, wearing it means it’s permanent
Physical presence determining your inadmissible absence
And I tell you I will undo long before the clasp does
The chain crawls up my wrist, throbbing
And my weighted heart is lugging tired lungs
And your heart is with me, so long as promises hold true
The tarnished gold tells of tragedy, but the kind forcibly forgotten
I realize I’d love you when it all meant rust and corrosion
Intimacy borne of ruination and I ignore its quiet delusiveness
Skin and metal coalesce in secret passion
The permanence would lose its meaning and so would you
Until we could only graze the clasp and each other
Reddened crimson stains seep into a slick crease
There’s an ever-present pain that is not numb, just unfeelable
And it kills me to touch the colorless metal
Memories and lingering fingers alike learn the weight of rust
A dull ending pulsing in the interlocked links
How grim is it that this chain will let me hold you best?

So many things to ignore
I can see you but I look away
Your eyes stay on me
My eyes stay off you

So many things to unpack
In the dark of my window light
I see the memories play back
My thoughts stay off you

So many things to forget
Your fingers dip and twirl
In the folds of my brain
My mind stays off you

So many things to long for
Fabric shifts and gathers
Revealing explorable bareness
My hands stay off you

So many things to remember
Illuminated crinkles along our cheeks
Freckles multiplying in the crevices
My love stays off you

Othello! Othello!
You vibrant young fellow!
Let all your troubles give way.

If you grow mellow,
I will turn yellow,
And die before my wedding day.

The cowards of Venice,
Know of no menace
Beyond the eels on their shores.

In Love’s Hall of Fame,
You’ll write your name,
As you club all the eels
And make love to the whores.

Othello! Othello!
Put Hell in your hello!
Know the innocent cling

To finer young masters,
Some killers, some fasters,
But of you they all will sing,
All Venice, of you, will sing.

Those rectangular shaped glasses,
analysing audiences
and countless apparatuses,
sitting proudly atop your nose bridge.
As they view life from
an alternate paradigm.

Your mind speaks
as fibonacci leaks
words with shrieks
and cyber-freaks stare
at the image you paint
with your metaphorical sword.

Wisdom beyond recognition
that dances in the exposition
of a story that faces demolition
as you face the pretermission
of your mistakes,
yet rise as valedictorian

A smart nut
with a hard head
A river
with no dead-end
A road
without a bend

Don’t be afraid
to let me clean
those crocodile teeth
of yours.