Category Archives: Poems

Snails – Poem

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Snails

Annie Dillard wrote
about them once, how they followed
a circular trail of slime
for weeks without changing
direction, their reluctance to alter
course almost killing them off,
the need of sustenance reaching the critical
before any would deviate,
even the slightest, to survive.
I know how that feels — a process
ancestral, intestinal, ingrained;
fleshy and dense as a slow organ
producing its juices, leaving a scrawl
across my front porch thick
and tremulous as an old widow’s signature
on a bad check, or a trail of relatives
honing in for Christmas dinner.

Week 93 – New Poem

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I actually managed to write to a prompt for the second time ever. And, I only had about an hour to write this the day before it was “due.” It was late, I’d interned all day, and I was tired, but I wrote it anyway. This is new for me, people. I used to believe I needed oodles of time & energy to write poetry. Now, to write good poetry, that’s probably true. But I managed to write something while tired, and under time constraint, that I don’t totally hate. So yay for me.

Week 93*

– Sunday

No money
in the offering. No one’s
offering. I pass
along.

– Monday

Offering a service
that no one
is buying. No more
a few dollars & I
am that number, a minus,
a blunder. Remainder of
subtraction
after subtraction

– Tuesday

In the refrigerator:
sauce
& garnish. Nothing
substantial. Zero
nutritional value. The making
of something from nothing

– Wednesday

The fuel gage E
like a three-
pronged fork
on its side, defeated
& stabbing at air.

– Thursday

The paper costs
money. Paper
for paper. Ink
for the printer. To
sadden the paper
with past. Smalled
to one page. Résumé.
Resume. Refused.

Refuse
in a cornered heap
of Others.

– Friday

The mailbox key
is stuck. Like a needle
on E. Envelopes stuffed
like yellow lettuce leaves
in a Styrofoam box. In-
sufficient.

– Saturday

Everything’s done. The phone
doesn’t ring. No one’s
offering. Cut
off. No more
extensions. I’ve been
disconnected

*93 weeks is the maximum allotment of unemployment assistance.

For the We Write Poems weekly prompt.

Freeing the Weeds – Poem

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Freeing the Weeds

Every Saturday
I hold the garden back,
hack away
at branching leaves,
trim the fat
from trees in my denial
of their girth,
tug out weeds
that push
to light
between the cracks
like plucking eyebrows,
tweezing sly hairs
from the forehead,
wanting each week
to give in,
let stray blades meet
in the middle
and the dark bristles
grow like moss that hangs
from backyard branches,
swinging free
in breezes,
fragrant
and untamable.

For One Single Impression’s prompt, Weed.

Cockroach Poem – Poem (obviously)

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Cockroach Poem

I am not afraid of obvious dangers; can appreciate
the snake, his contractions and curls, the calligraphic language
of his body in motion. Or the spider and her radial body,
her windowpane webs gathering gnats and beading the dew.
But you, what purpose do you serve besides ugliness,
lurking in lightless places, surviving my appointments
with the exterminator, my daily cleanings, my commitment not
to attract your kind. Last night I heard you whispering
through the air filter in my bedroom, the soft
and unmistakable grating of your wings like skin peeling,
like an unfolding letter of condolence, the black
almond of your head poking through a white slat,
just for a moment, then disappearing, continuing to scratch
inside the air shaft long after I went to bed.
In the morning I pulled the filter out of its frame,
found your crisp and iridescent body wedged into thick lint
and filter fibers. Radiation studies may negate
survival as what separates you and I, but it doesn’t matter.
I imagine you everywhere dark and unacceptable,
a raisin shell skittering over towels and spoons, like a haunt
across a grave, dragging your dark armor of indifference.

Shot Dog – Poem

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Shot Dog

Before the 187th Airborne Regiment dropped down
at Sunchon without incident and took the town, his division

was ordered to Nevada, where atomic bombs glittered
over the desert. Six miles out from ground zero, they dug trenches

and camped for days. When Shot Dog went off at 1,400 feet
and the soldiers curved themselves against the trench

like babies in a womb and covered their eyes, he saw the bones
of his hands through his flesh and the flash of light. When static

from the control room ordered them to stand and witness
the cloud, the heat waved across the desert and knocked him

on his back, then knocked him forward on his stomach
after he stood up again as the air was sucked back in.

His helmet and one army boot were gone; the roily spectrum
of the mushroom spread above him, not black like a thundercloud

but churning with light, red and red and orange and blue
like colored water inked across the sky. He tried not to think

it was, but it was beautiful. Before they got their orders to march out
for maneuvers, an officer strapped a film badge to his chest to test

the levels of exposure on his skin, and then he boarded a truck
filled with soldiers. As they neared the heart of the explosion,

he saw sand burned to glass, Sherman tanks submerged into earth,
and structures of steel and concrete vaporized into jagged remains.

But the dogs were still alive. Half-burned, blinded, skin and hind-
quarters missing, the bars of their cages bent and smoking

against their bones, lying on their sides, unmoving, not even the eyes,
except for their tremors of breath. When he saw the dogs he thought:

of course. Of course there would be dogs, he accepted this as readily
as he accepted his own dog-march into war, and yet, he stopped.

As he reached out and laid his hands down against their heated flesh,
the breath of the dogs slowed in expectation of release, but the veterinarian
in the control room with his euthanistic needle would wait another day
for the radiation levels to die down before he did his work. Most of the dogs

would be dead soon anyway, dead from the toxins, dead from the burns,
but animal need is futureless, immediate, inapplicable to science or war.

As he stood up and moved forward to follow his ordered path
across the drop zone, the pathetic wail of dogs rose up behind him,

desperate, incredulous, insistent that the broken bond of skin against skin
be unforgotten, and by the time he made it out to the perimeter where an officer

waved a Geiger counter over his fatigues and professed him clean,
he had come to hate those dogs, and he continued to hate them

as he showered off in the makeshift latrines of Desert Rock, and he hated them
while he vomited for three days after the explosion, and he hated them

while his nose and gums continued to bleed for months after that,
and he hated them while he shipped out for Korea, and he heard

the wail of dogs in the rushes of rain while he lay in the rice fields,
and he heard the wail of dogs in the mournful marches of civilians

on dirt roads, in the windblast of a cargo door opening over Munson-ni,
in the graze of a bullet against his ear before it pierced the helmet

of another soldier, and as the fallout from Shot Dog continued its journey
eastward over North America on drifts of wind, and Iodine-131 rained down

on farmlands from the thunderclouds for months after the blast, he learned
that in the absence of mercy, he would always hear the wailing of dogs.

Sharkie – Poem

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Sharkie (a somewhat true story)

My brother had a fish that would leap out of its tank. He’d come home each day and check
behind glass, search and crawl on hands and knees, fingers cast into seas of blue shag.
We found a piece of screen to cover water and prevent escape, but the fish would batter
his silver body against its mesh like hard rain until it slipped enough for him to fit.

(One day my mother found him with her foot, half-dead again and flopping, the wire screen
nudged over, the tank still bubbling with colored rocks and plastic sea-divers, and she said: enough already. Left him there, didn’t pick him up until he was still.)

I kinda told the truth in this poem, and I kinda followed We Write Poems‘ Wednesday prompt requiring parentheticals. My brother did have a fish named Sharkie that used to leap out of its tank on a regular basis, and Sharkie did occasionally get stepped on. My mother, however, never tired of putting Sharkie back in his tank, and while I’m not sure how he died, I’m fairly certain it was not from one of his out-of-tank experiences. On, and the prompt required three lines, with a fourth line in parenthesis. 

Unnatural – Poem

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Unnatural

You say I should get out more, that I
should admire nature, that I should swim
in its decorous wisdom. You say humanity

is the stupidest of creatures, and must repair
this umbilical snip from its own creation.
But what am I to admire? Surely not

the sun, rising and setting its work
each day without question, until it buries
itself against its own darkness. Not

the blinking packs of birds blotting
the sky each simple year, or the hurricane
which gripped an entire city with its bluster,

then wandered off and squandered its power
over an empty stretch of marsh. Not
my dog, who’ll do anything for food,

or my cat and her haughty obsessions,
or the silver maple in my backyard
which has yet to figure out it’s January.

The queen’s wreath in the garden
is greedy, it does not know when to stop,
and the passion vine is vulgar, whores all summer

to the bees that die knowingly in its folds.
And what about the fish you caught last season,
with a rusty hook already lodged

in his opalescent jaw? You freed it from your line
then threw it back, and it glimmered away,
ignorant of its own recurrent escape.

Debris Field – Poem.

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Debris Field

This is how we conquer
the mountain, bottle
by bottle, leaving a trail

of leftovers, transforming
our glory into another little shitpile,
a littered barometer of hubris.

Leaving even our bodies
behind, stiff as frozen dinners, foiled
by the basest of elements:

moisture in the air, a monsoon
wind, a thunder of shifting snow.

Maybe the Goddess will wake

and birth an avalanche
from her forehead, wipe away
our little cluster of culprits,

or perhaps the crevasse
will grind us with its icy
teeth, sift the bone-ash back

to a lower glacier – where a team
of Nepalese environmentalists
can collect it with the rest

of what the mountain rejected –

transparent water bottles, prayer
flags that never reached
the peak, the shreds

of winded tents, oxygen tanks
in jellybean colors collecting
on the mountainside

like confections on a theater floor
after midnight’s show.

I originally read the term “debris field” in relation to space waste – human junk orbiting the earth such as satellites and spent rocket stages. But when I tried to write a poem about it, this is what came out instead.

Tropical Depression – Poem

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Tropical Depression

Unlike other storms, Alicia
never wavered, never eyed

another destination, her satellite coil
of clouds blotting out

the TV radar screen, tracking westward
along the coast

towards the island
of our salvation. Headlights guided

a tourists’ line of retreat
on Seawall Boulevard,

windshield wipers clicked off
a steady stream of missed opportunities.

The scent of coconut oiled the air
inside our car, milky and nostalgic, the linger

of a summer already ended,
and all our little failures

swept across the glass
and puddled in the flooding street.

City Girl – Poem

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City Girl

Red wasps have taken over, swarming out
from nests tucked beneath the awnings
of the porch. He tells me not to worry,
that we can learn to coexist, that only fear
of each other brings us harm. Yesterday
I took the boat out, felt the current steal
strength from my hands, watched the yellow oar
sink into mud. Instead of rowing, I gave in
to the drift towards shore. Morning comes,
he takes his gun, heads out to conquer,
while I trace gravel roads past
the pasture fence, rough beams of wood
tied tight with twine and rusted nails. Every day
I climb this path of hills, as if rising
to some conclusion, some vital thing,
while his shots slam out like proclamations
against silence. This morning, a wasp flew out
from a corner of the kitchen, hovered over me
like doubt, like thoughts gone awry,
like some vital thing. I left my coffee,
half-sweetened, on the breakfast table as I ran.