Of course I’ve noticed
how you’re drawn to
what you call my
wounds symmetry
doesn’t beckon the eye
no— disruption &
disorder a lopsidedness
reminding you you are
dreaming the rest of
your life asleep in
expectation until a
patch of bark shows
you a swirl & a
swelling about a gap
that once was
wholeness my
surface wavy like old
glass the slow
assemblage of cells
moving in to cover &
protect rippling up the
roughened river new
growth a whirlpool
whose center narrows
by season & I know
you want nothing
more than to stick your
hand into this soft-
edged opening to feel
reparation what we
trees are go ahead
touch me & awaken
to doubt
– Mary Buchinger…
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Names. You’ve got this thing with them. The names of plants, rocks, native species. Concrete details have become a favorite pastime.
Vehicles, clouds, chemical compounds.
You file names away in no particular order but know right where they are when you need them. And you will. Need them.
Architecture, muscles, functions.…
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Hope slips through fingers
like time spent waiting
often just a tick ahead,
visible, but elusive.
Or it hangs back like a stopped clock
no longer viable.
Hope survives fire, preserved
beneath blackened structures
housing every possession.
It resides beneath blankets
of the terminally ill until handfuls of dirt
hit casket lids.
It drips down the sides of chilled
liquor bottles and heroine needles
passing through moments, days, years of addiction.…
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Abiquiu, New Mexico
I return to Leopoldo Garcia’s home gallery
where, this damp morning-glory morning,
he wears overalls and one tennis shoe.
Yesterday his litany of augurs, acrylic and clay
flowed like red nectar. Hummingbird
in his studio, I bring a gift of poems.
Leopoldo paints with a hole in his heart
pierced by a priest darker than a cassock.
He grieves for the children gone forever,
mica tears grafted on flat masks, tiny
eyes, round mouths. Nearby his studio
a weathered red and white figure…
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12/21/16 @ 11:28 a.m.
I walk my dog
Through liquid air
Miniscule droplets
Pelt my forehead
As I make my rounds
Of the parking lot
The winter solstice
Less than a day old Only yesterday
The morning sky
Not quite fulfilling
Wakefulness Yesterday
…………………………………………………………………………..The shortest
The sky Of the year
Blue-gray
With a tinge of white
At the border At the horizon
Like an artist’s canvass
Not quite ready
Prepared
Flat
Waiting
…
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In search of light and love and lost time,
the months are flying by
faster than either of us imagined.
Loneliness speeds us to the grave
more surely thandisease,
yet we remain impotent in the face of it.
Try as we might to cling to the past
and each other, the present
has a proclivity for mass murder.
Wind swept and shell-shocked, we stand
on differentshore lines
ineluctably alone, defying the odds.
Our fates inextricably bound, written
by fear and solitude,
unerringly devoted, waiting around to die.
– Mark A. Murphy…
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. . . you burnt your lip on the coffee mug, distracted by the pretty crow eating french-fries in the parking lot, thrown out by a litterer during a conversation with a potential lover who wanted to impress with callousness, the girl who was only in the car by virtue of a blind date agreement, trusting another’s word, who hadn’t noticed the bird or the fries, her window rolled up since she was chilly, her mother’s advice unheeded as to the need for a sweater for the evening, the lights still on at home, that mother sitting, not really watching the television, wondering if the daughter will do what she did on blind dates, the worry turning to fantasizing about lost years and chances, the husband, separated from the worried wife, prone in a downtown apartment – cars passing loudly along the avenue – intently watching a rented DVD, absently murmuring on the phone with an old girlfriend, that woman, at work in the restaurant on a break where the fries originated, having just dropped some more for the giddy teenagers idling in line at the drive-thru, which is visible from the table where you sat when, instead of being in the moment of coffee and conversational enjoyment, you were entertained by a frolicking bird in the innocent evening sun in a littered parking lot – of which you blamed – mentally – for causing you to burn your lips, which would later tempt me but were ultimately kept at bay due to the pain.…
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