Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
Alison Stone
How to Mourn a Famous Friend
Recoil from the headline’s slap.
Scroll through all the phases of her face.
Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.
Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.
Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.
First Pomegranate
Which part of this crimson
honeycomb to eat? And how? Sun
highlights the knife’s blade, stripes the room
like prison bars.
I watch you scoop seeds, then copy;
savor sweet-tart bursts
as red pearls open.
Your food soothes me, your kind,
scratched-by-smoke-and-whiskey voice.
You must meditate, Sweet Pea.
Learn to let go. You’re just like me
at that age – beautiful and charming,
far too stubborn.
Not with you.
Lost Ghazal
Midnight. Teens wander – beautiful, lit, lost.
A homeless man waves his torn flag. Git lost.
How close lie pleasure and oblivion.
Till Roe – missed period, dead rabbit, lost
future. The waning moon makes her wonder
about old boyfriends – cop, convict, Brit. Lost
to time or wives. Renunciates fear their
hungers. The grump toasts, Here’s to more shit lost.
The woman pulled to pieces by her kids’ and
husband’s needs. She offers kiss, toy, tit. Lost,
the free, whole self she once was.
Late October 2024
Ghouls in the bushes, bones on lawns.
Leaves reach the height of their fire
and the veil between the worlds thins
toward the only day that I am
once again my mother’s child.
Some people avoid this doom-focused revelry –
children’s faces bloody and scarred,
plastic fangs crammed in their small mouths,
spider webs and gravestones in suburban yards.
But it’s the living who can hurt us.
I’m hollow-eyed from too much news,
my family fractured,
democracy unravelling.
Amber Nicole Thurman
What is the sound of desire –
heart reaching toward nursing school,
time with her six-year-old son?
Pieces of the unchosen future
rot inside her,
turn septic.
Lonely Ghazal
The house smelled of cats, mildew, loneliness.
Through empty rooms, the wind blew loneliness.
Sometimes the Eyes are Enough
What a woman knows, she tells slant.
Let men and the sun spill everything.
The moon, too, keeps secrets.
Birds broadcast their news all day.
Stormy Weather (Redux)
I Love You, Stormy Daniels
(a tanka)
Sweet the cuffs will close
due to a porn star he said
looks like his daughter.
Cops got Capone for taxes,
too. Who’s grabbed by the crotch now?
[Originally posted on April 1, 2023.]
Quarantine Beltane
Hey, ho, make a merry din!
Weaving over, under, laughing at mess-ups,
we circled, flowers in our hair,
ribbons chosen to match our desires.
Choiceless Villanelle (Redux)
How fragile — heart, brain, womb, sinew, and bone.
How easily bodies, and dreams, can die.
A woman’s safest when she is alone.
Yellow Circle/Helios/Great Ball of Gas
Spooning, our dog and cat doze in the sun.
Tails twitch and amber eyes close in the sun.
Into the Woods
Hope sparked by a bright field. Sorrow, the woods.
We caution children, Don’t go in the woods.
Like the Night
He chose friends for wit, his bride for beauty.
She always erred on the side of beauty.
Punk soul in a Father’s body, Hopkins
wrote the motley an anthem –- Pied Beauty.
Mary Oliver’s speaker walks with awe
through the world. Dickinson’s died for beauty.
“From the inside.” “Eye of the beholder.”
Well-meaning parents lied about beauty.
Betrayal
When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.
Failing Upward (Two Poems)
Trying To Think About Anything Other Than Israel
Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.
Dreamtime (Pantoum and Ghazal)
After Hours
The lives we didn’t choose meet us in dreams –
teacher, pilot, maker of origami doves.
Landscapes morph or disappear
to house wishes our day-lives hide.