Writing :: Poetry
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Mother Fails to Watch Rob at School Fair
Rob raises a fist to Mother: a small plastic baggie,
twist-tied, sloshing with water and a goldfish.
Mother buys a tank, coordinated gravel, fish food,
seven decorative plants. The next day,
Goldie gapes, rolls its eyes and fins belly-up,
sinks with a scale-loosening thump on the gravel.
Categories: Poetry, Uncategorized Poems
Mind Missed the Bus
Mind was always awkward,
never certain how to please.
He’s certain now he’s late
for dinner, evening chores.
Categories: Poetry, Uncategorized Poems
Mind’s Eye is Glass
Mind’s left eye is glass, colored
like the cat’s eye he shoots
across the blacktop every afternoon
while bags against the fence
dwindle down to one.
Categories: Poetry, Uncategorized Poems
We Need a Dead Woman to Begin
If someone visits every week with flowers
to lean against stone, there’s no evidence
within the grounds: only this splash of bright red
against rust and steel.
Categories: Poetry, Uncategorized Poems
Your Neighbors Lost Their Alarm Clocks
You watch them scramble into cars,
balance piles of papers on top of briefcases,
tug at ties or shoes too loose to stay
in place.
Categories: Poetry, Uncategorized Poems
JuPo #7
all those years you blamed
the taxi and some late-night traffic jam
that ate up your hours like I’d had dinner:
in starts and stops at each new sound,
Categories: Poetry, JuPoWriMo 2006
JuPo #6
By the third day, rust stains the bandages
wrapped around your arm, around the pins that hold
your bones in place.
Categories: Poetry, JuPoWriMo 2006
JuPo #5
You in the hospital after hitting a light pole
head-on, forty miles per hour, dying--
doctors said dying, machines beeped and beeped,
you stared at nothing: not me, not the future,
not light fixtures on the ceiling.
Categories: Poetry, JuPoWriMo 2006
JuPo #4
You painted the spare room blue, stenciled sailboats.
Then yellow: an office neither of us would use.
We stacked seasonal boxes in the corner, bought
an air mattress for the guests we never had. I kept
the door closed: easier than confronting all the dust.
Categories: Poetry, JuPoWriMo 2006
JuPo #3
She doesn’t smile at the clerk’s hello.
Pays cash. Asks for paper,
not plastic.
Categories: Poetry, JuPoWriMo 2006