Author: poetryfest

I imagine our bodies entwine
like vines seeking sun, our passions intertwine

fingertips trace constellations on fevered skin
in this celestial dance, two bodies align

whispered sighs float on heated breath
pulsing, a rhythm divine

sheets caress as we explore each other’s terrain
in your arms, I’m intoxicated by this fine wine

hands explore curves and planes with reverence,
a trail of pleasure’s design

in this sacred space, we lose ourselves completely
becoming one, crossing every boundary line

this dream, our sacred poem, speaks of love’s sensual delight
where passion and tenderness seamlessly combine.

Although you hold my hand, and gently wipe my tears, your criticism is my destruction; and your words are my worst fears.

You tell me that you love me and that you hate to see me cry. Yet you yell and call me names, and make my confidence die.

You say that I’m the problem, and I believe every bitter word. I scream and cry and shout, just wanting to be heard.

After years and years of fighting, my hatred for you grows, but you make me feel so selfish, as I’m writing all my woes.

I realize that you’re broken, that you truly are trying your best. But your best isn’t enough, not when you’re supposed to build me up instead of tear me down. Sure you make me smile, but you also make me frown.

But what I hate most of all, is I see your traits in me. Your temper, your judgmental nature, and the way you always disagree. The way you slowly shop, your hair, and your need to be right. I see all of it inside me, and it floods me with pure spite.

I don’t know how to feel. You do a lot for me, you love me, and you truly wish the best. But then you turn around and scream and call me names, and make me constantly stressed. Sure you don’t physically beat me….. not enough to be abuse. But you mess with my emotions, and you turn my head against me. I hear your voice nonstop, drowning all my confidence, making me second guess, telling me I need to change, and that it’s all my fault. Thanks to you I trust no one, and my heart is locked away in a vault.

I know you try your best, but your best isn’t enough. I know you can’t help it, that you’re broken, that you’re damaged. I know that you have trauma too, wounds that haven’t been bandaged. But I still don’t forgive you. Maybe one day I will. But until then, you are no mother of mine, you are simply Jill.

**Important!** My mothers name is Jill
Commented [1]: For context, my mothers
name is Jill.

After the painting “Miami Eden” by Jason Aponte

I know your dialect –
heavy heat, restless green,
the hush before the thunder
when everything holds its breath,
the wild is always in season –
a Möbius strip of sun and storm,
highways spooling between sawgrass
shimmer of canal water,
where desire and danger root deep.

The wild is not only what was born here
but what arrived, uninvited,
roots seeking the same sun,
scales glinting in the same blue light.
We inherit the aftermath:
python’s silent hunger,
air potato’s spiral,
the echo of peacocks in neighborhoods
where the only native song is memory.

I know this land by the ache of its heat,
longing grows in the shadow of banyans,
how the heart swells with each green pulse
of something not meant to be here –
python muscle tighten around memory,
iguanas flick prehistoric tails
across seawalls and sidewalks,
feral hogs root up the old stories,
tegu tongues taste the eggs of hope.

Your green climbs my bones,
the python’s slow coil,
the iguana’s flicker in the hibiscus,
invasive, yes-
but I want you, my love, to take root,
to press your hunger into my soil
until I bloom with you,
tangled, lush,
dangerous.

I walk the sawgrass edge,
my heart a comma between longing and loss –
the ache of what’s vanishing,
the thrill of what survives.
I pray to believe in renewal,
in the way fire lilies bloom after the burn,
but some things do not return.

We are always driving, always arriving
at the edge of what we cannot control:
the wild slips in through open windows,
seeds of want carried on the wind,
the pet we could not keep,
the garden that outgrew its fence.

What grows within us is not always native.
Something invasive takes hold –
a vine, a hunger, a secret wish –
and we name it only after
it has flowered, after it has choked
a native song from the air.

The wet heat under my skin,
South Florida’s wild pulse –
I taste you in the thick air,
salt and sugar on my tongue,
your hands a fever,
your breath a storm that never breaks.

Still, there is beauty in our chaos:
the riot of color, the flash of scales,
the way the world remakes itself
despite our best intentions.
We are exiled and at home,
a comma in the sentence of this place,
breathing in the wet heat,
learning the dialect of survival.

Listen to the wild –
not just the birds we know,
but the ones that have learned
to sing new songs in our trees.
Let us walk the exhibit of landscape,
each step a pledge to notice,
to name, to begin again.

Let me be your native wild,
be the vine that climbs me,
your lips the rain that slicks my skin,
your body the thunder that shakes my roots.
We are not meant to be contained-
our want, a species unlisted,
thriving in the forbidden places,
making the Everglades blush
with the memory of our touch.

Every story here
is a story of longing –
for roots, for belonging,
for a place to bloom
without harm.

Let us become the caretakers
of what remains,
writing our own story
between the drainage ditch and the stars,
where the wild waits,
where the wild remembers.

May we learn to listen
to the hush between storms,
to stories coiled in the grass,
to the warning in the wind.
Let us become caretakers,
not just witnesses –
writing a new stanza
where the wild is not lost,
but fiercely, tenderly,
protected.

I want you like the Everglades wants rain,
hungry, flooding, wild and without apology.
I ache for you invasive,
roots uncoiling in the dark.

Map me
like a new territory,
I want your mouth to name me
in the language of sweat and nectar,
to let the wild in you
find the wild in me,
and together,
to make this place
ours.

I’m the python in your garden,
slipping beneath your skin,
tongue flicking secrets,
pressing my wild into your native.
I want to taste the salt-slick of your shoulder,
devour your sighs,
make your legs arch like mangroves in storm surge.

Let me vine up your thighs
flowers opening only for your touch –
petals sticky, fragrant, dripping with want.
I want to tangle you in my wild,
leave you gasping,
your name is a forbidden species on my lips.

Let my mouth be the storm that drowns you,
my hands the roots that hold you firm,
my tongue the fire to your fields.
I want to flood you,
overrun you,
leave you trembling,
your body a new river mapped by my desire.

Let’s make the gods jealous-
let them watch as I take you,
again and again,
until the only thing native here
is my name in your moan,
the way we ruin each other
beautifully,
wildly,
without end.

And she’s just hung up a brand-new banner.
It’s a tactless candid of all her children
flustered, glimmering beneath sheets of summer sweat,
sodden in soggy starched suits and wet silken dresses.

The scene: A moment frozen of us waving her down,
wide-eyed and irritant, as if she were moments from
landing an old biplane without her wheels folded out.

You first note our burnt eyes barking from the salt baths.
Our growling scowls, growing out of motionless mouths.
Our smiles are doors opened by sesame seed keys.
Yes, this scene is the perfect portrait of her progeny.

We begin by taking turns begging her, ‘take it down,’
each in our own special method of bartering.
But she averts us with her practiced alibi:
that, ‘this is the best pic she has of us all,’
and by that she means: It’s the newest around.

When one of us hopelessly reports her post, (Harassment),
she retaliates with an album: Each image, us in awkward, unscripted poses,
wide-lensed angles of pimpled moonfields, pocked noses,
mouths brimmed of foodmash, eyes shuttered like letterboxes,
gardens grown graciously between our coffee-stained bicuspids,
avenging hairs emerging wild, like John McClaine out of air-ducts.

And when the digital dust settles, we wave our white flag emoji’s.
The posts stay hung in an album called, ‘my lOvely Children5 – Part 4’
where they will stay, decaying data bytes, until a new Y2K claims them,
or unless we finally get that Facebook password figured out.
So far, it’s none of our names.

Speak your last words to me
I’ll carry them—nestled in.
I’ll have them ring right in the ear
As if you were right here with me.

I’ll tuck your feet where you sleep—
Pat dry your tears
And draw wayward crosses on above your eyes,
Just like you did to me.

Place your hands with mine fiercely between the chest.
And hold like gold your foreign breath.
Just like the comforting care
Of the mother of a mother.

Across the sea if so it may be,
Having met several different strangers,
Biding with a dancing tongue to keep up appearances,
Speak your last words to me—
I’ll remember them.

Grief chews my ribs like an untamed hymn,
keeps me awake when the streetlights dim.
Your mug still stains on the windowsill,
cold as the hand I can’t keep still.

I smell your shirts when the house won’t sleep,
salt on my tongue where the nightmares seep.
Your laugh is a ghost in the hallway’s throat,
a knife in the air where your shadow wrote.

I beat my chest to a broken drum,
every thud asks why you don’t come.
Even the dawn feels counterfeit here,
a paper sun I can’t hold near.

But still your name claws stars apart,
scratching the sky like a desperate heart.
If grief is proof that you ever were mine,
then I’ll bleed this hymn till the end of time.

‘Gone’
You are gone,
And my love is lonely now.

*
‘Like Clay’
From love my grief was sculpted,
By the hands of Grim.
Laid bare to dry in Summer sun,
And dust again by Spring.

*
‘Leftover’
You left me with a candle,
A fervent little flame.
Yet there’s nowhere left
To put it now.
So in my heart
It stays.

Yes, they make love, whenever they desire.

Like all lovers, they make love, they travel, they share joys, they endure sorrows—if sorrows should ever come their way. They are brought together by the same fate that binds all who fall in love. They walk side by side, confide in one another, love with their whole hearts. They will not invent some unheard-of cause for conflict, nor will they add a never-before-seen hue to the spectrum of love’s brilliance. Yet this does not diminish the singularity of their bond. Like all sincere affections, their love is both unique and
irreplaceable.

Of course, they make love, in ways both imaginable and beyond imagining.

…

None of your business.

…

None of my business.

For Ollie Ambrose

My mother’s grief sounds like her joy
When she laughs
her diaphragm falls into her stomach
When she cries
her lungs carry her heart’s ache

I try to run away from both.
I don’t hide very well.
My eyes are only shut.

Her grief and joy skip
into my dreams holding hands

I ask them,
What do you want?
Her grief holds my face.
Shouts my name.

Your mother’s (mother’s) mother is gone

My mother asks
Why does everyone leave

I have no answer
I have no breath

My mother sucked all
of the air
even my air
out of the air
and her wailing follows
my mother’s mother’s mother
soul
out
out

I use the exhale
to inhale.
I don’t cry.
I don’t want it
to be confused
for joy.

There are no tears from
my mother
her anger

guilt

burns them before
they are free

I let her borrow
mine.

Eventually
my mother’s grief
leaves with her joy
skipping, holding hands

from dreamless dreams

we sit