Category: Poetry

Somewhere between these fantasies
of ocean parting eyed angels
and this swipe left swipe right
ephemeral bullshit
is the real thing
and if you’ve felt it
you know it isn’t special
and it isn’t different
and it isn’t anything new
but it is love
and it’s yours
and it’s heavy
and dirty
and drunk
walking barefoot down the street
sharing lips on a cigarette
snoring
with terrible breath in the morning
but you kiss them anyway.

– David Lukas… ...continue reading

We saw it painted orange
and filling with smoke.
The walls upended and rode
gravity to the earth—
the people followed suit.
They lifted their hands
to fan the smoke
but drowning the fire
wasn’t in the cards.
We tried to brace
the stonework
on our backs,
we tried to lay the bricks
again. The broken men
became ghosts and buried
their own bodies. We left
the rubble behind.
We washed our hands of it.

– Amanda Stovicek… ...continue reading

My vision today

Transcends that of all before

And still I seek more

I witness colors

You cannot identify

Nor could even name

Virgin resonance

That you denote only as sound

Enriches my ears

And taste: such richness

Cascades across my palate

So effortlessly

Each is alien

And equally elusive

And always will be

Haiku was never my strong-suit.  It never had to be.  Five syllables, then seven syllables, then five syllables have a Zen quality about it.  I would like to tell you I wrote the poem, but I didn’t.  Not in the normal sense.  What I did was collect the words already suspended in the ether and arrange them in a pattern acceptable to the reader.  No pen or paper.  Neither a dictionary nor thesaurus. … ...continue reading

– dedicated to Larry Fagan

 

If I find
your bones, one day,
caressed by time
and cradled
by your children’s
handprints,
I will know
them for the laughter of others
reverberating within.

With words
still unknown,
I will whisper
my admiration,
my worship
and my sorrow
into their hollow.… ...continue reading

We drive this turnpike across the length
of Pennsylvania for the hundredth time, as I
look through the smudged
windshield where my footprints are seen
when the light allows.

The highway is a barrier,
the laundry behind it waves in the sun—
a dimple on the day’s face. 

Things I can’t see: evaporation—the exit—
the floating up; the invisible water christens
itself into cloud, chanting:
I am one of you now
I am one of the heavy places that hold it all together
until I can’t…

There is the welcoming, dry earth; the ill-timed
clothes, pinned up; a summation
of someone’s life, up against the interstate.

We are viewers perched in front of the exhibition,

there are people standing against
large, red trucks—making O’s with their mouths
for cigarettes, before they blink past;

And then more laundry, hard with that sun-tiredness,
but dotted with the dark spots of the moment above.… ...continue reading

Rambling through the brown hills and
rumpled ridges from the observatory

that reminded me every element in
my body (carbon, calcium, nitrogen,

hydrogen, phosphorus, and the like)
came from an ancient star—but

all I can think about are swaths of
star-drenched redwoods, stippled starfish,

all the star-crossed lovers in the world who
shoot past each other, just out of reach.

In these moments after the molten sun
has sunk under the Pacific, a raw wind

whipping through the ribs of the Jeep and
my friend’s bare shoulder leaning into

my own tank-topped chest, I gaze up,
past the slender palms and power lines

to the glimmering specks in the dark
purple ocean of the sky, and consider

how the chemicals were put to better use.

– Ben Groner III… ...continue reading

Linger awhile . . . so fair thou art.
–Goethe, Faust

the little honorary pallbearers
place their boutonnieres
on the casket before it is lowered,
but for once I am not thinking
about death or about the woman
I knew well long ago, nor—
when people I haven’t seen
for decades hug me as if
just last night we were swapping
stories around someone’s back-
yard fire pit—nor am I, in this
moment, obsessing about
the passage of time, caught
up instead, as it comes over
the slight rise, weaving through
the headstones, silk roses, teddy
bears, tiny American flags,
the guy in a straw hat throwing
wilted flowersinto the back
of a pickup truck, struck
by the sound of someone else’s
bagpipe procession, the wind
taking some notes, softening
the edges of others so that
one could almost believe
in some other land there, foreign
but familiar, just over the hill,
but fornow it’s enough to be here
in this moment, the one in which
my granddaughter kisses my wet
cheek, reminding me of nothing else,
carrying with it no dramatic irony,
no conceit, just a moment
like so many, these days,
I might wish to let linger.… ...continue reading