Author: poetryfest

Gladly gave you my life,
Like you’d given me your hand.
Laced around the blade of the knife

Indistinct, our blood mingles.
A Tragedy, they say, offhand.

The only speaker of a language unfounded,
A couple months of fluency
Deigned to echoes of anguished antiquity.

Now, I cannot talk to the girl I died for,
Only the manic wake of our suicide pact.

A second body beheaded, a phantom limb pain.
A gunshot wound to a chest that belonged to you and you only,
yet still wasn’t yours.

Every intensive surgery, every attempt to erase it all is wasted,
A pathetic copay to your apathy.

I find myself right back at what I told myself was the end.
What a mockery, isn’t it?
What kind of an end is it if it’s the starting point of my realization that I will never be able to
bury what I like to think of as dead?

I said, “Knock knock” and you replied
By asking who was there.
And when I said, “Banana here,”
You said “Banana where?”

Again I said, “Knock knock,” and you
Were trapped in paradox
Banana round and round and round
From hat down to the socks.

Again I said, “Knock knock,” and you
In paradox were trapped
Banana’s what I always sang
Every time I rapped.

At last “Knock knock” and you replied
Frustrated with the joke,
But orange you glad that I said “Orange?”
The paradox was broke.

He sat upon the window sill.
The morning sun made his fur glow an even brighter orange.
Oh, to be an orange cat sitting in the sun.
I envied him.
He had no worries or fears.
He only had to sit upon the window sill,
Observing the birds and the squirrels,
And taking naps in the sun.
I put on my work boots with a sigh.
The orange cat didn’t have to go to work.
He could sleep all day if that is what he pleased.
I envied him even more as I picked up my keys
And headed out the door.

you sometimes said.

We knew about your aneurysm for the last
twenty-five years, that bulge in your heart

and chest that could swell with blood,
and like a balloon, burst at any time,

killing you in less than nine minutes, you explained.
They told us it was inoperable.

So there was nothing for it but to be constantly afraid
or forget it and live, which we did,

while it ballooned beneath our radar for years.
Until last fall, when your legs and arms began to swell

–even then we did not realize that this meant
your heart was failing–

but there was to be no quick death.
as your heart began to leak blood

into you lungs and chest,
releasing the pressure but slowly smothering,

choking you,
and so your swollen aneurysm grew,

in the last weeks,
like a foreign body,

–yet also a living part of your heart–
until it carried you breathlessly away

in the middle of the night
and you left me on the shore

of a January morning,
alone in the early mourning light.

this morning waking up
seemed to me to be an
impossible task.

but now here i sit
at my desk looking
out of the window
joined by little lavender
who nestles herself atop
my books
tiptoeing through The Divine
Comedy ever so studious
just like mama honey who sits
peeking through the wilted white
roses i refuse to abandon.

together we watch
as darkness clears
and streams of pink
and orange and gold seep
into the sky
like sherbet or watercolor
freshly applied to canvas.

i sip my coffee.

honey lifts her head
over the mug to breathe
the bitter nutty scent
and lavender follows suit–
still learning
how to be a cat
how to be a human
how to be
a living-breathing-entity
with eyes and ears and
thoughts and feelings and
still learning
how to cherish every
moment she is offered
like the sky,
this sky,

which now has faded
colors in a cotton
candy embrace
blue-purple-pink
supported and uplifted
by timid yellow who has yet
to raise her head.

but she will.

and we will be here,
at this desk,
when she does,

waiting.

waiting and demonstrating
how to be.

– s.b.

Donald Trump doesn’t want me to have children
And it’s personal,
Though I’m sure he’d argue otherwise.
But you can’t ignore the plethora of emails
stating that I don’t deserve my IVF coverage and health insurance
because I work for the federal government
and, therefore, am of course,
lazy
and therefore, of course, should not be
contributing my blue eyes to the gene pool,
and therefore,
really,
am I even an American?

I pay all my taxes.
My productivity was 136% for the fourth quarter.
and maybe most importantly,
I’m still in my pop punk era.
So I do what I fucking want,
even without Uncle Sam, I mean Uncle Trump’s, permission.

motherland.
mag mell —
resting, resting
whatever you say
(say nothin)
some city birds were silent snitches
so i ran back,
mag mell
motherland.

ceantar, the place we inhabit
alltar be it’s shadow
quantum time between them
are you listening?
fall through na réimse
two slanted mists
trace teanga back as memory
ways of being beyond shame
before the words were beaten
out of us.
n/a

The walls are hung with loneliness
like tapestries of riderless horses.
The dim glow of a lamp flickering with
lost thoughts pales against the
winter-shrouded windowpane.
An echo of remorseful silence resounds
in the emptiness of the room’s want
like a spiderweb torn by wind shears.
On the floor, parquet designs in a mosaic
of stumble steps puzzle, questioning
direction. A rug has rolled up on itself
hiding darkness within its shadows.
The hum of motes seeks its home
among the dust. And I huddle in the corner
whispering your name.

The wind blew us in from the sea;
I don’t know anyone here, and neither does he,
so, we wander the streets of this small, coastal town,
looking for souvenirs, both sought and found.
A left, a right, another left, and then, suddenly,

a doorway into shelves of old records and DVDs,
gleaned from dusty bookcases, and now in front of me.
Steadily, we flick through the racks, listening to the sound
of the wind that blew us in from the sea.

Back at the hotel, we crawl into bed ever so gently,
and when we wake, he pulls me in even more deeply;
for a brief moment, I know what it is to drown,
to fill your lungs with something as profound
as the wind that blows in from the sea.