I philosophize too much,
even when washing my hands,
contemplating, like Saint Francis does a skull,
the healing and cleansing properties of soap,
reducing my reflection to its bare essentials
until distilled to only the elements of soap,
potassium fatty acid salts,
and I’m back to chemical properties—
No mind-body problem there.
Should’ve been a priest
(at least the wine is free),
but I’m not, because
people I love say religion
is more lethal than heroin.
Accept nonacceptance, they say.
Except for acceptance? I ask.…
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Shingles peel from the roof—
just corners at first, then all at once,
like sodden bandages. Nothing heals anything
…………….forever,
…………….or completely.
These storms, they take their toll,
walls of gray blooming over breakwaters—
last light leaking over top, casting yellow on the cove,
just beginning to swell.
A thick branch falls to half-frozen dirt—
new wood showing pale at the cracks—
and rolls to the water. These storms
will wear it smooth, toss it back to a beach later, made special
for a mantle in a city
or some landlocked state very far from here.…
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The old man says a child
that loses his home only hangs
his sack of misery around his neck.
This country turns me on my legs
like bats and has bleached me
clean of all the midnight dreams.
The spring flowers here have lost
their early morning grace.
I think of redemption in a foreign
river, to immerse my body in this water
and tell my mother to witness my baptism.
The old man says wherever a snail inches
it carries its home along and sometimes
that is the only song you need to know.
– Salawu Olajide…
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What colors paint
pandemic?
The wood pallette,
streaked with some
dried oils that
stubbornly defied
turpentine, did not
want darkness and
fear hues. Sable
brushes with a
faint odor of linseed
oil stood ready.
Protective mask,
fitted vinyl gloves
seemed out of place
near an easel used
to hold stretched
canvas. Fear, in
twenty-twenty,
would not be
recorded by my
tools. I opened
the tube of cadmium
yellow squeezing
sunlight instead
of anxiety.
– Lois Greene Stone
Note: This poem was first published in May 2020 by Scarlet Leaf Review.…
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for Bruce
We have lived long enough in this house
to have filled it to bursting
with all we no longer need,
long enough
that the silver on the back of the bathroom mirror
has begun to flake away with age.
I don’t really mind that it’s flawed,
like so much else,
but you find a mirror to replace it
and ask my help to take the old one down.
It leaves a mirror-shaped blank
on the bathroom wall
over the sink where we taught our daughters
to wash their hands and brush their teeth.
Then you bring in the new mirror,
pristine, unaged,
and I help you hoist it,
our two faces looking grimly back at us again
as we measure to be sure it’s even
and fasten it in place. …
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I read that once in a while one must look
up into the tree branches & glimpse the stars
scrawled on the leaves’ pale underbellies.
The book says the ocean eats itself everyday,
coral & nematodes clinging to each other
against the scraping teeth of wave on wave.
I must live the life of the aesthetic
fortune reader, tea leaves for breakfast,
clamshells before bedtime, a silken shawl
on my shoulders to draw to myself
when the ghost in the fireplace howls.
The book taught me love must grow
in the damp places of the earth, mold
& mushrooms spreading out in rings,
spirals of moist heat, bugs crawling
upwards to find the sun, a million writhing
things pushing up through the loam & rot,
with nutrients in their mouths
& love escaping from their breath.…
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I bring a newspaper to act as talking stick.
The back page stows away a story about
the imaginary future of capitalism
and its artifacts. Photos of oil cans
and fluted orchids graze inside copy.
The question I pose to the students is:
What’s inside your shrine? I pass the stick
around the circle. Deafening silence.
Not since a question on self-identity has such
an iron curtain of reticence taken hold.
The talking stick returns to me as wrinkled
as a shorn Shar-Pei. “Okay,” I acquiesce.
“I’ll add a few relics to mine.” They’re
as familiar as dying embers slumming
in my right ear.…
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