Even in darkness
or hidden by a curve
there are vibrations
before it appears,
barreling towards
me, waiting small
and scared, shivering
in the glare
from the headlights,
wishing for someone
else to save me,
sure I’m not fit for the job.
Here they come–
Headlights of the express
train bearing down on me
here,
where I’ve tied
myself to the tracks.
Tag Archives: poem from prompt
Express Poem
Impossible Poems
The birds inside the airport
Flying at the windows, trapped,
Starving for sky.
The ruined marriage,
Stained and crumpled, shoved
To the darkness at the back
Of the drawer you won’t open
Because there are all those sharp edges.
The way that every year
It’s the same dreary gray rain
That cracks open the world
Till it blossoms.
Infestation of Ladybugs
Ladybug, maybe
because you’re bright red
or it could be the polka-dots–
It’s like an infestation of something round
and cheerful—
turtles, or raspberries.
Or maybe it’s that you’re such an April insect,
inspiring nearly everyone to recite poetry
about the big subjects: Fiery disaster,
Children leaving home,
Your plucky effort to save that one child,
the youngest, of course,
who, God know why,
hid beneath the pudding pan.
Maybe it’s because of that story
I consider you kindly,
think you so harmless.
You seem so old-fashioned then–
to even have a pudding pan
much less a child beneath it.
Just Like Trees
Rain fell for days, stopped.
This is goodbye,
bare trees like matchsticks
waiting for a flame.
Soon, you’ll burst into
new green, fuzzed like the babies
in your nested branches.
Together may you open, bloom,
take to the air.
Broken Home
For the month of April, to mark International Poetry Month, I’m trying to write a daily poem in response to someone else’ s prompt instead of writing about whatever wanders into my head that day. It’s hard, weird, and interesting, all at once. The prompts I’m using are posted by Robert Brewer on his inspiring blog, Poetic Asides. Today’s prompt: write a broke poem.
I let everything in our house
Stay broken for you.
I left everything
In our house
Broken
For you
Now that you’re gone,
Slowly,
Like springtime arrives this year,
Broken latches,
Broken railings,
Broken chairs,
Are cured.
I fix them
Then
Make dinner
Make a poem
Make a home.
Suffering
Rich language
stumbles at the same word
describing
injured soldiers, slaughterhouses,
refugees, cancer patients,
Lincoln’s face, toddler tantrums,
boredom, thirst.
No glibness.
I want to invent words to show
the vastness of the oceans between.
Instead, you show me
a map of the universe
where all our suffering
Human, animal, planet
is so small,
disappearing
in all this night sky.
Hunter and Hunted
Instead of gratitude for being noticed,
there are days when the world gets tired
of all this applause and dissection
and tries to hide.
Like us all, now and then the world wants privacy, not
this woman stalking it with a pen, commenting on
every item in the world’s blue-green basket:
Skunks and pineapples,
Blizzards and espresso,
Another pineapple,
Chalk drawings, tennis balls, thatched roofs.
And here’s the trouble with anthropomorphizing everything—
Now I feel sorry for it,
as it scurries away,
like the spider I disturbed in the flowers this morning
startled and on the run, me hurrying to catch it.
And the spider has no idea
whether I will crush it or cradle it gently to a new home
now that it’s captured my attention.
The world says to the spider, I know just how you feel.
How To Interpret Dreams
The baby on the pogo stick at the top of the stairs? That’s your career, teetering, ready to leap into what looks like the thin air of disaster.
Oh, the one where you and he barricade yourselves in the bedroom, barring the door to keep out the maniac with his face, his name? Well, that’s tied to the dream where a mountain lion prowls the divorce lawyer’s office, hungry and sleek.
These other dreams, over here? The goldfish bowl floating on the ocean, or the one where you shelter from green rain beneath the theater marquee? They could mean anything at all.
Last, the dream where you’re scrambling for the right pen in a drawer full, hurrying to write the poem before the door opens and it slips away?
Well, we all know what that one means.
The Wild Couches of Spring
One by one, they escape–couches, sofas, davenports.
They sag by the curb, breathing deep the fresh air of front yards
nonchalantly, as if we might not notice, as if this were their native habitat.
Another sign of spring, shy couches familiar as robins, rain, forsythia.
But one faded floral holds a sign in her lap declaring herself,
brazen as as a teenager with a slogan on her t-shirt:
I Am Free.
Posting A Letter
is the phrase in my head
when I fold this ink on paper
into its clever envelope.
And I say it to myself in a clipped British accent,
and a crisp cotton dress, belted, with a
full skirt. Matching heels. Nylons.
I pick up my tiny handbag,
slip on white gloves, pearl buttons at the wrist,
and go to post your letter.
Days like these, this is me
waving to the past
on its huge island,
while everyone else on my ship
rows frantically forward,
hurling electronic messages into
the static filled sky of now
(except you, posting a letter to me).
Puff Of Smoke Poems 