The Wanted, always, envies the Needed,
regarding it bitterly
as the senior party between them.
It makes no secret of this fact:
How sweet a day must be,
it muses,
to bask in affections
without ever glancing over shoulder,
having no cause to dread
the turn of the wheel;
how sweet to shed the shame
of being marked a luxury.
Now, the Needed is more coy:
It fears not the ebbing of tides,
having settled well into a rhythmic life.
But, privately, the Needed longs, longs
for the thrill
of being a thing of covet.
There must be a certain grit
forged in the disquietude, it imagines,
a hard-won self-respect that banishes
any doubts as to one’s caliber;
for the Wanted thing must fight
to hold its keep,
always jockeying to charm a fickle appetite. …
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The faces behind the trees wither
……………With the radiance of will-o-the-wisps.
To the uninitiated eye this blood
……………As thin as moonlight ribbons loss.
For those who have lost more than life
……………There are rivers deeper than oceans
Ascending these hills and hollows.
……………Bone is a dull bell the winter rings
Into shapes of haunting, melodies
……………That compose your specific gravity.
Returning limb for limb the weight
……………Of absent children. The pregnant womb
Emptied by the callous moon. Eyes
……………Of bloodshot destiny, hands made cradle.
The flower of youth that will never bloom.
……………The earth turns away from such use.
Tell me, am I wrong to pull
……………The dead into conversation, seeking the name
She would have carried among
……………Their number?…
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She has one knee pulled to her chest,
Her face downcast.
My biological host stole the sun.
I can’t bring myself to call her mother,
But I’ve always had a good imagination and will try.
I understand now, I told her.
Hardened eyes kissed by time,
She’d seen it all.
My human mother raised a mirror.
Do you see me?
I asked the statue, but ivy armor muted her.
My mother’s heels stabbed into the dirt for the family Christmas photo.
It was winter; the stone was cold.
Come spring, chlorophyllic stains wept down her chest.
I’d feel her breasts and pretend
The blood pulsing in my palm was a real-life heartbeat.
Do you love me?…
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I dreamt that I had a baby girl.
In the dream, I cried cinnamon
and birthed a fairy from my belly button.
I held her in my hand,
struck by her smallness
and the intrusive desire
to crush her in my fist.
Instead, I circled my thumb over her tiny cherub belly.
Yellowed wings like an old book
slicked to her back, and
bloody ringlets dampened her head.
She had my grandpa’s nose in miniature,
a grumpy little mountain.
She was funny looking,
fat and small like a bee.
The way boys look
like old men shrunk down—
she looked like everyone I’ve loved
got in a mirror and shattered
and we glued it back together wrong.…
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lightning strikes splits me open ozone sharp and
pungent filling the skies before thunder can do its
tepid heralding my favorite view out a window is
a grey expanse ripped open by electric lavender
knives but i had never imagined the atoms
their trembling after vibrating with exothermic
pangs begging to turn back but this is all there is
the mean bifurcation of a trunk and janus with head
turned not looking into the past but gaze palsied
rooted to the present burning foliage or to future
growth yes even from the charred remains tiny
rootlets spring upwards feeding and reveling
with no sense of decorum at all this is what
happens when the tree falls in the wood
with no one there to bear witness no one to
weep just mundanity crawling along like an infant
– a a khaliq
Author’s Note: A morning lightning storm is one of my favorite kinds of weather, as destructive as it is by its very nature.…
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In Texas,
They declared a heartbeat alone
enough life to preserve.
I watch my baby girl
Suspended in darkness,
her heart barely blipping at 120 bpm.
She has a tail, paddles for hands and stumps for feet,
two dark spots where eyes will be
and a spinal column.
No head, no brain, nowhere near human,
but a heartbeat pulsing through the womb
I waited my whole life to hear.
In Elizabeth City,
They declared a grown man,
not worth saving.
He had a heartbeat,
and 10 kids, and a spouse, and
four decades of HIStory.
And two hands on the wheel.
The thunder in his chest
pounding in the darkness
until
he was aborted
by people who promised to protect
and serve him.
No more waiting.…
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You came to us
with your cataracted mother –
matching duo in a stippled
vertical lattice of black and grey
after a thunderstorm
in a swollen sodden summer
Ears bigger than ghosts
big as wolves hearing the horizon
perched radar on a rail of a body
that has to fatten up to honor them
Rick you should see how he has
made the upside-down envy
gravity and how he asks questions
with a peek through laced leaves
He sleeps in a planted pot camouflaged
indigenous on our sun warmed patio
or in woolen knitted hollowed hole
He would have played with you
In a whirling game of fast
varsity gymnastics
he would have walked on your chest
and purred
In your last bed or your first
Pick up a stick with feathers
my brother, past the place
where the owl inhabits
night
He is a creature of freedom
as you are now, finally
from a boulder of debt and breathing
wait until she carves his face in a
pumpkin
when snow comes
falling with the last
mandarin maple
keep him safe
in those thickets
of cattails
– Roy Akiyamo…
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