Author: poetryfest

Enraged!
Need to engage
Share the information
Stop the desecration

Stop Ice dot net
Doing the work
Alerts to sign up for
A way to show up for
Our brothers and sisters

Educate
Don’t fumigate
As if we and they
are not human beings
As if we and they
are not being seen

What happened to the I and Thou?
Martin Buber tried to explain
We are not separate but One
What’s going on? This world is insane!

What happened to Having that Dream?
The one Dr King tried to Bring
Dreams and Dreamers are treated
Like curses and bad words that sting

Feeling helpless?
Not sure what to do?
When masked men show up
To take your neighbor who
We are commanded to love

How to resist?
How to persist?
Remember John Lewis
Get in good trouble, necessary trouble
Keep sharing the information
We must stop this desecration
——

Political division,
The war of whose rights matter more.
Or as it’s so often referenced,
Right vs left.

Whose lies are we instructed to swallow
for the next 4 years?

Safer borders or better economy,
Restrict immigration or restrict use of
pronouns,
Which is more logical?

“Pronouns aren’t up for debate” – they say
So why are so many young trans people killing
themselves?

But no – “Pronouns are the issue.”
Meanwhile, planes take off – carrying
deportees back to starvation,
back to the wars we sold them.

“Logic,” they insist,
as the bodies pile up on either side.

for R.W.

We used to celebrate October,
long shadowed, all Hallowed,
haunted month of our births
with afternoon tea, bitter amber
brew and sweet pastries.

Yet now I remember you
as dim November, balanced between
your end and autumn’s,
unwritten poems in your head,
hands empty of gifts, given or received.

It’s been a year since your
soul wisped into translucent ether.

This morning there’s a chill wind as I run
uphill, lungs contracting in cold
brown leaves crumbling underfoot.

This close to Thanksgiving
I’m grateful for the respite
of waning light leading
me to blank sleep of winter nights.

I’m grateful for mourning doves
cooing me awake, even as in faint, brittle
dawn I mourn your voice, your words—
still, your song’s not ended.

It is the end of June,
and as I am reading
Joan Didion’s The White Album,
I remember that it
has been six months
since I laid flowers

wrapped in brown paper
outside of your office door.
It has been six months
of clicking past PDF
documents you’d shared
with me before December’s

first snowfall. It has been
three months since your
brother let me sift through
your library, and it has been
three months of turning
my head away from the books

I had taken. I manage to read
thirty seven pages of The White Album
before noticing the muted, fading
lines of graphite within the
paragraphs and along the margins;
a small circle around “script.”

My cuticle drags over the pencil
marks. We never discussed the
ethics of writing on a book’s
pages; it’s clear to me that we
would have agreed and clearer
that you are still here with me.

My soul was about stripped from me today:
Wind whipped cold air as a car slammed on the gas
Just to cut in front of me. Ice beneath my shoes
Melted from the heat of my rubber soles.
Left me walking on water. Almost tripped.
When I stepped through the front door,
You carried me the rest of the way to my bed,
And didn’t complain when my soles dripped
on the carpet. Each drop landed with a dull thud,
Or maybe that was your heart hitting your ribs
Against the shell of my ear. Oh well. You slipped
Me into bed and renewed my soul stripped
With quick pecks on my forehead, cheeks, lips.

Birthday for me was my 17th
I wanted everybody to know.
It was my golden birthday this only
happens once in your lifetime
And I thought, how long it was going
To take for people to get tired of me saying
Todays the day.

“Hi precious,” you said,
I held back tears, oceans,
for time was running out.

Just like when you left,
wearing a white shirt
baggy, blue jeans
and a white bandage
wrapped around your arm.

Your smile reached your eyes,
your embrace was warm,
I couldn’t remember the last time
you looked so alive.

We joked and teased,
smiled and cried,
I couldn’t believe
you were right before my eyes

“If you would’ve lived,
how much longer?” I asked,
hoping your passing was
random and not set.

You shook your head
and held my hand,
“It was always
meant to be
this way.”

Anchors weighed
on my chest,
as I felt our time
nearing an end,
I asked,

“How will I know,
when you’re there for
the big moments?”

“I’ll let you know,
I’ll find a way.”
He beamed.

Years have passed,
milestones have gone,
I wondered when, if you’d
come.

Yet, when I heard
our favorite song
At my first job,
before my surgery,
And at my graduation.

I hoped that it was you.

When our ancestors grieved
They gathered
Slashed off their hair
Or sang dirges with fire
I want that
I want to bang a drum
As hard as I can
And howl unabashed
Until I bleed and bleed
And every vein is a desert road leading
To my desert heart
Until the sky the grass the highway bypass
Are marked
With my sadness
There is no place
To voice my mourning
But for the ice cold
Internet
Six in the morning
I post a poem to strangers
About a baby
Who lived and bled
And grew and died
Inside of my body
I watch
Reactions tally up
On my laptop screen
Like I watched
Her ember heart beat
On the sonogram screen
My face aglow
And did you know
I spent the first several days looking up
My maladies on Google
Where I finally found what I was
Looking for in various forums
Bombarded by women with
Nowhere else to go and
Questions concerning
Sadness ovaries burial bloodtests sex
We are all
Grieving
I would like now to thank
Sweetpea1048 for what you said
About losing a child and sinking
Hormones
You are my sister and friend
ILYSM
I write this line here
Click click
Go to bed in the dark
Silence

Silence fills the void of the outspoken hallway
Forgotten names bounce around on the peeling walls
Picture frames start to fall without being embraced
The home reminisces everything that it lost

Morning exchanges are no longer heard
Water drips from the faucets simultaneously
The once warmed home is suddenly cold
The memories of different faces disappear

The air is stiff as shadows begin to reappear
Nightly conversations are no longer heard
No one lives here to call it home
The phone rings, although no one calls

The death was too quick,
people complained, it is suspicious,
they accused, faces crinkling, in
hushed whispers, so that my uncle
did not hear. And when the burial came,
it was too small, they said, it was confirmed now,
they agreed, my uncle had killed her…
and for what? Two new cars? Again they
kept this to themselves, maintaining
an artifice of neighborliness.
You’ve got it wrong, I did not say, it is
me, the murderer. And every day after I went
to the room where my uncle had buried her,
his wife, my aunt, to confess. You see,
just the day before, I’d had the first orgasm
of my life. I was 13. When you’re that young,
the patterns are unopposable, there is no
data, no rationale on earth
to defy them. I believed: since I’d killed her
already, since no matter the tears I could never attain
pure remorse, why not, again, once more?