this poetry has been my life’s challenge
and I rose to it
every time
this poetry the arena I boldly entered
and I’m fighting still
I’m not quite sure I’ve imagined
locked doors of academia
and their thousand reasons
to do something else with my life
but I owe it all to poetry
it was my access to the inner life
lit my smoke in front of
the firing squad of time
gave the muse a fire escape
she could climb
in just an overcoat and heels…
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Mom is being buried today.
We will never see her face again except in photographs.
The coffin lid came down a week ago, forever,
or at least the seventy-five years it’s guaranteed.
Only seventy-five years, although it’s made of copper
the salesman said was indestructible.
We’ll all be long gone by then,
except for the grandchildren (maybe)
and great-grandchild.
Something to be said for being buried
not too far from Disneyland.
Four months later, on Shelter Island,
a cloud is coming toward us,
swiftly falling, like the ghost
of a meteor about to self-destruct. I can’t
tear my eyes away, until it passes—
not falling after all, only moving on
to the next—house, table, life.
I want it open.
Do we all want it open?
We take our seats under a shelter,
in the heat, before the coffin.…
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You and I took the old Jetta out there years ago. We drove into the sunset because you couldn’t wait for morning. On the drive over, you bounced your leg up and down and pointed out each color—the orange hue that turned pink, like the jars of powder you mixed to lemonade. I reached over and touched your thigh to steady it. You calmed. You wrapped your hand around mine. It felt soft, small. Your skin looked pale against my own, tinted red. The radio played old love songs, lyrics I didn’t know. I smiled when you belted out each word loudly, with confidence. You didn’t care that you sounded like a screeching cat when you missed the high notes. And neither did I. My memory often recreates your voice as flawless. …
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This is about knowing yourself.
When I was a kid,
I remember writing
on a small piece of paper:
“I am gay”.
Then I tore it up
and flushed it down the toilet,
trying to forget the truth
I had just confessed.
Because that disease is not true:
that only happens in the movies,
and to that one distant cousin
of my mother,
to whom she doesn’t talk to anymore.
…
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Imparting tiny grains of colored sand with intricate thoughts
One giant flower covering the ground. It was so beautiful
I wanted take it home with me.
After it was done, he smeared great swaths of color against itself until
It was nothing but white sand.
It should have changed my life. I should have taken it away with me
Let his day disappear in the pursuit of beauty, but just the beauty of the moment.
I fully intended to go home and erase everything I had ever written
With the artist’s apparent satisfaction at the act of creation
Should be enough for me, too.
– Holly Day…
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On Friday, the crowd stopped by the most vulnerable place. A library. An orchard. A school.
The people in the crowd raided bakeries because they’d never baked bread. Shot at rotten houses because they’d never had to live in filth. Every experience they didn’t get, they annihilated for the humans to come.
Then the caravan trudged onward. The nurses on duty cursed as they removed broken glass from bleeding bodies.
They had marched for the same number of days as the age of their oldest walker. 83.
I traveled with the crowd for 9 Fridays. On the 10th, the crowd schemed to raid every treehouse in a suburb where white picket fences got hosed with an unlimited supply of potable water. Where roads extended into dead ends and every pothole was the cause for an evening’s complaint.…
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He’d been sawing on her abdomen like a sadistic carpenter for what seemed like hours. As she lay on the table, motionless, afraid to move or make a sound, he dumped the acidic liquid over the bloody slash in her gut. It would’ve scorched her pale, tender skin if she hadn’t gone numb from the waist down several hours ago. What the hell was that? Vinegar?
She’d always been a conscientious person; treated people the way she’d want to be treated, got a college education, paid her taxes. She would never understand what she had done to deserve this outcome. As she’d busied herself with cleaning her apartment and finishing her dissertation on the failings of modern feminism in America earlier that afternoon, she had the feeling that someone was observing her. …
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