Along the path I stop and smile,
to sit awhile among the trees,
and see the air and ground agree,
no argument beneath the sky,
is why I stop to sit awhile,
Along the path I feel the shade,
to fade into a distant glow,
and show just what the day has sown,
warnings of a peppered sky,
is why I stop to sit awhile,
Along the path I stay to dream,
believing I have ransomed grace,
alone to face the night’s embrace,
sheltered under sunless sky,
is why I stop to sit awhile,
Along the path is respite calm,
leisured on the days unrest,
investing in the silence kept,
muted stars in quiet skies,
is why I stop to sit awhile,
Along the path I talk to God,
applauding what He’s given me,
in meanings of the truth we seek,
solemn whispers to the sky,
is why I stop to sit awhile,
– Dan Lucas
Author’s Note: People have a tendency to have stronger reactions when taken out of their comfort zone.…
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While buying groceries
at HEB. Sometimes I stand
and stare too long at
all the chocolate,
so many choices,
the Reese’s Pieces,
peanut butter package stained
with blood, shaking
hand reaching.
This continuous climb
into Everest explosions
after that mortar
landed, each IED
that implodes another
memory. Each mortar
fragment that cuts into
Alicia. Sharpened shrapnel
slices flesh. Jagged pieces
of her, fragments
of me breaking
a decade later. Another
memory slips on loose
rocks, falls further
into desert sand
below, unravels and disappears.
I hike higher, reaching
closer to the Reese’s,
but dig deeper into
my own sand grave.
– James Deitz
Author’s Note: 22 veterans commit suicide everyday (VA 2016). 22 EVERYDAY. Hopefully, through awareness, support, and poetry, this tragic statistic will decrease.…
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I could not sleep in the hotel next to steppes.
The star of hope revealed the midnight
I heard sounds behind the wall.
I knocked on the wall for the first time.
Someone said: Be a dreamer!
I knocked on the wall for the second time.
The gentle voice said: Be a red romantic!
I knocked on the yellow wall for the third time.
The mysterious door opened in the wall.
And the blue Erl-king appeared.
He was romantic and dreamy – a gentleman
I spoke to him.
As a bird, the Erl-king took me on wings,
so that i could look at different walls.
The first wall, black, was the Berlin Wall.
I saw the ghosts of people who fell here.
They were drunken of the poetry of hope.…
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In her dream
she dips her fingers,
languid, in the river
that flows, liquid silver,
by the window
of the fourth floor
without entering the decorative
wrought iron that adorns
the sky.
She understands,
the ineffable,
the improbable and the inexplicable
nature of this moment
and she smiles, mischievous smile,
at the radiant people
who lazily pass
armed with oars
and bathing suits
striped by the sun.
With delight
she contemplates the lucky
parade, joyful multitude
and she remembers
another encounter
with friends
on a train with broken
floorboards
through which wild
flowers exploded jubilant.
And, upon waking,
she discovers
Rome painted
by the daily beauty
of bread and circus.
– Amy Nocton…
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I slept with a faceless man
and his shadow. The seas know
nothing of the case. His caresses,
arrows that I taught to soar.
His manhood, sullen.
He hit me with a hammer
on the coccyx. We lived
that spiteful health
with which hunger kills
when laying with another body.
I had a shipwreck in my bed.
He desecrated all my saintly shafts
wrapped in God and bed sheet,
he did not ask permission.
We talked about celestial decorations
and icons. But it ended when the
saint and sign was given.
– Sergio Ortiz…
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“qualia” (n.): the internal, private, subjective component of sense perceptions, referring to the “what-something-is-like” aspects of conscious experience
a tintinnabulation of rain
on the tin roof
or—
I was underwater in the warm sheets, the
quivering crackling of rain above me like
last night’s fire, resin sizzling off the fat
pine, and was someone playing a piano?
here it is, I promise:
a december drizzle awakened me
gently, like a mother’s touch, from
childhood dreams into an envelope of
electric blanket warmth, and through
silvery rivulets on the bedside window’s
thick glass I glimpsed an early covey of
quail muttering, disappearing, into the
misty mississippi morning wrapping
greyly around spindly skeleton trees
above deep jade gardens, the brick
courtyard a dried blood red, and the
world was singing an ode, or a lament,
or both—
so, then,
a tintinnabulation of rain
on the tin roof.…
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That on a day like any other
I walked hand in hand with my mother
away from the rose garden where my father
stood with his hunting rifle pointed towards
the sky; a place of promises, paradise and stars
or unseen angels who watched over the meek
and the wicked and sometimes intervened
if wishes were granted, if enough Hail Marys
were said and if some saintly soul
long dead was watching out for you.
That on that day like any other I heard
my father break my mother’s heart
with his threats of violence to himself
and anyone in close range, where I’d been
mesmerized by two robins who fed their young
as they flew back and forth from their nest
of twigs maybe a hundred times between them,
when my mother pulled me along the cobblestone
path into a grove of trees; our makeshift shelter
where bullets might weave in and out
of leaves and never find the mark or even
that mama bird whose beak was full of berries.…
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