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Tag: poems

Gasoline, Meet Match

The bustling elocution of
the eight-track saints

rattles nerves like diodes
hitched to an electric chair

Rancid impulses coagulate
around anger, another rant
blares from the radio

Car racing homeward
lizards skulking among
dead armadillos on the shoulder

One last chance for a course change
flinging into the driveway

desperate to say, I understand,
forgetting reason frothed to static

going instead for the gun

This is for the latest wordle prompt at Read Write Poem (#88). I like these word list prompts because I generally approach the writing with no preconceived notions of what the poem is going to be about. I just let the list of words play and try to see where they land. This one kind of surprised me.

Summoning

We hadn’t been walking long when I stumbled over ivy-covered stones. I bent to have a look. Found names and dates from the eighteenth century. Other stones, each with familiar names from the island’s past and dates long gone, lay scattered and toppled, poking up through centuries of leaf litter, soft soil and faded old beer cans.

We learned the difference between
boneyards and gardens of eternal rest
in the hours before the sun went down

Where faces fluoresce in ultraviolet light
stories             leapt                from stone

two broad-winged hawks
circle overhead and a little
girl calls for help, her voice
coming from, disappearing into
slow-moving creek water

An incandescent spark
between two wires reveals

dead snake
spiders under a bridge
raccoon scrambling away
water               full of memory

screams

submerged
washed away
generations ago

resurface

You knew this would happen,
my inscrutable friend.

You knew.

This is for Read Write Poem’s Prompt #85: Spooky, which asks participants to respond to a picture of two guys in a graveyard. It’s a cool image and you can see it at the RWP site.

Three Poems about Vultures & Grackles

Two of my poems and a short prose piece were published yesterday over at Thirteen Myna Birds: “God Hates Grackles,” “Lines Discovered in an Aging Ornithologist’s Field Journal,” and “Circling Vultures.”  They are part of a series I’ve been working on about vultures and grackles called Birds Nobody Loves.

Poems don’t stay around long at Thirteen Myna Birds so check them out before they fly off into the ether. Be sure to look around and check out the other pieces in the current flight formation while you’re there as well.

In case you missed it, another poem from this series was published at Bolts of Silk last month (“My Tourist Yard“) and another, “Good Authority,” will appear there later this year.

We Talk of Trains & Train in Round Rock

My poem “We Talk of Trains” and my photograph “Train in Round Rock” were published in the latest issue of ouroboros review. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a really classy poetry and art journal. You can read the magazine online or purchase a copy through the site’s bookstore. Whichever way you go, you’re in for a treat. I’m honored to have my work, which can be found on page 24, included with so many fine writers and artists.

Check it out. Go. Now.

Transcript of a Recording Found in a Briefcase Abandoned on the Plains (c. 1977)

It’s hot here.
I don’t mind.

Was it in Memphis?
Hot?

No. You know. Where it happened.
Not Memphis. No.

Where? If you don’t mind.
Tucumcari.

Tucumcari?
Yes.

You thought it would be somewhere else,
but things can happen anywhere.

You left there and came here?
Pretty much.

Is it true you won the lottery?
Just a scratch-off.

But you did win.
It was cursed.

Don’t laugh at me.

Sorry. Cursed how?
I see people as they really are. Their true faces.

What do you see when you look at me?

What?

Please.
Is that really what you want?
You’ll understand what… happened…
better than you might really want to.

Tell me.
Can I tell you a secret first?

This was inspired by the latest image prompt at Read Write Poem (prompt #81). To see the photo (“XX” by nwolc), which is really cool, follow the link to the prompt or go straight to its Flickr page.

Waking for the Descent

We grabbed sounds from the air,
stuck them together, draped
language around actions,
tethering ourselves to history
inscribed in vellum, barked
and trumpeted for all to hear.

All this tonnage… it seems like magic.

We learned to tell convoluted
tales, twisting facts like
movements in a bellydance,
sapient and seductive.

What is that mist out there?

We carved the world like onion slices
to be devoured one-by-one,
ignoring the other passengers’
wrinkled noses.

Hold my hand.

Thumbing through the final pages, I skimmed
the moribund bibliography of My Heart:

Bark, Vellum K. Tether the Bellydancing. New Drape City: Moribund Hand, 2003.
Trumpet, J.J. “Tonnage.” Devouring Convoluted Onions. Mistburg: Sapient & Sons, 1993.

Fasten your seatbelt.
The plane will be landing soon.

This is for Read Write Poem’s wordle prompt (#79). The idea is to write a poem using a given set of words. All of those words comprise the bibliography portion of this poem.