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.
Alison Stone
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.
Outdated Ghazal
To be reborn, break the caul of the past.
Take off the moth-eaten shawl of the past.
This moment’s open doors and empty rooms.
Portraits, mirrors line the hall of the past.
Cow blood on the sheet can save a bride’s life.
Danger of scripture, alcohol, the past.
How to Cope
Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.