November’s Featured Poet – EG Ted Davis

Edgar Davis-

Burned to Hell

You would burn me
by incineration
within a crematory,
and how shall I
gather up my bones-
at the great resurrection-
if I have not bones
to adhere new flesh to.

You’ve sentenced me
to an eternity of hell-
just to save a
few burial bucks.

_______________

To receive

If we perceive,
if we understand,
then certainly we should
turn our hearts..

and receive forgiveness.

_______________

Questions answered

You have every
and all answers
there in front of you.

Just reach out,
seek
and ask.

_______________

Bunny diving

The Easter deception deepens,
as the Easter Bunny has now taken up…

skydiving

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EG Ted Davis is a 59 y/o retiree and disabled veteran residing with his wife in Boise, ID. Work has appeared in various online literary journals to include Poydras Review, Leaves of Ink, Scarlet Leaf Review along with others.

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October’s Featured Poet – Ditta Baron Hoeber

Ditta Baron Hoeber-

we will not

I

I cannot keep you. one can die first or be bereaved. there are no other choices. I listen to your words. but in myself I am silent. what is the anger that reappears and reappears but does not speak.

I cannot keep you. one can die first or be bereaved.

II

evening dream

two hands
reach
to rest on my shoulders.

the cat does that
reaches to my shoulders
with soft paws.

I can’t see your face.

III

affection

the picture crossed my consciousness as I was speaking. it was my chest pried open my heart a dark red pulsing thing.

IV

morning dream

the conversation is provocative

I lift my hand to still my chest
my hand
brushes against my breast

the room flies apart then slowly reassembles

V

will it be like death this absolute ending we will not sit together and speak again. (clothed in loss.) (would feel naked without) a picture of nakedness comes into my mind and my mind fills with pleasure.

_______________

reach

I

my breasts. want to leap out of my shirt.

I have to smile at that. sad as I feel. I have to smile.

II

I dream of you now.

III

when you were within reach I missed my dead less. you covered all bases. wore all the hats I had. you are out of reach now so my ghosts gently return. and you. now you yourself haunt me.

IV

when I am dressing only the black clothes call me. comfort me make me quiet and invisible. portray my anger.

V

this ending feels incomplete perhaps all deaths are sudden deaths.
sudden. sudden as in unprepared for. as in what do I do next. as in. the floor has given way.

can I step upon the air. dare I.

_______________

larchwood avenue

the label on the bottle has so much information. the date. her name. the doctor’s name. my mother mentioned that doctor repeatedly over the years. the name of the pharmacy which awakens nothing in me and the pharmacy address on larchwood.

larchwood avenue. I remember all the front yards in that part of the city the rose bushes and ivy and a tiny purple flower with a pointed yellow center. and iris leaning up against the iron fences. when I was small I tripped once walking past those fences. I fell and cut my chin. the cut took stitches but they weren’t made well so I still have the scar. but it is nothing.

was nothing. not a fright. nor is the little medicine bottle a fright. no. finally. it is information.

I unscrew the lid and look inside. a powder dusts the glass. I smell and the smell is dusty. nothing. but I hold it in my hand and this nothing is information. I hold it in my hand.

_______________

(Untitled)

a heat of feeling overtakes me my eyes my folded hands.

a heat of feeling overtakes me my eyes my folded hands. my mind watches. you watch. you say I will be angry with myself if I don’t speak. my mind moves to the place with words.

_______________

(Untitled)

I

yesterday dies
I am bereft

I’ve always believed
that others have it worse.

but mine is mine.

II

my father says yesterday is gone
I laugh and I say yesterday is always gone
the cab driver turns and says
–not always
and he offers his hand –give me your hand.
and I do and he laughs
–I just wanted to touch your skin.

III

yesterday
the news was bad

so I fixed things.

I fixed what I could.

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Ditta Baron Hoeber is an artist and a poet. Her recent poetry publications have been in The American Poetry Review, Construction Magazine, the American Journal of Poetry, New American Writing, Per Contra along with a suite of her photographs, Calypso Friends and Nthposition. She has been nominated this year for a Pushcart Prize.

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September’s Featured Poet – Kevin Casey

Kevin Casey-

Church Steeples

Perhaps we’ll never arrive, our insights
grounded, fastened too tight to this earth.

But if we’re to make any sense of it,
we’ll get closer to the Truth by degrees,

orbiting its mysteries in rings
ascending and tightening as they turn.

And so these church steeples have it all wrong:
instead of that austere finger pointing

straight and absolute toward heaven,
these spires should rather be spirals

that show the winding way we grow closer
to that knowledge and to our better selves:

the chapels in this valley would then shape
a strange landscape, spiked instead with corkscrews

that seek to pierce and drain the firmament,
drenching all who have thirsted for so long.

_______________

On Goya’s Fight with Cudgels

Tied to that cold, pastoral
landscape of towering clouds
ignited and shadowed mountains

tumbling to the humble vale,
the sunlight catches your jacket
as he swings his club
down upon you:

raised and balanced,
his shoulder, elbow, wrist
all wound, curved and tightened
for the spring’s release.

And your strike a sweeping arc
aimed heavenward; eyes rise
above the shielding arm
to gaze upon his bloodied face–

dark forms anchored close,
off-center, forever locked
in that perverse intimacy.

_______________

Guidebook Entry: Inventing Magenta

i.
The color Magenta was named after
the Battle of Magenta, which occurred
in that Italian city in the 19th Century.
Magenta is an extra-spectral color,
and only exists in the human mind.
When confronted with even parts violet
and red, our minds measure out the mean,
and so each of us invents Magenta.

ii.
In Milan to Magenta’s east we find
the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio,
consecrated in the 4th Century
and featuring the remains of several saints
reposed within their glass enclosures,
skeletons bedecked in beatified
finery, both blessed and macabre.

And in Turin, some fifty miles to the west,
you’ll encounter the Monumento
a Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia,
a marvelously executed
equestrian bronze in the Piazza
San Carlo, lined with baroque porticos,
bookended by two separate churches.

But amid these cities, in the heart
of Magenta is situated
the Basilica Di San Martino.
Charming without distinction,
the structure and its bell tower date
only to the early 20th Century,
and lack the apology of antiquity
that excuses the unexceptional.

iii.
Between its more imposing neighbors,
the natives of Magenta build their lives
just as we construct that hue, mixing sense
and memory, reticence and desire,
blending promise and regret–their days
no less real, though they surrender a degree
of splendor in that constant effort of creation.

_______________

Wood Chip Trailer Sonnet

The truck ahead tacks and weaves on this thin road,
pocked and warted over with daubs of cold patch.
Now mid-afternoon, the trees on either side
bathe in the glazed, green shade they’ve made, languish
in the summer insect hum. Not wide enough
to need a center line, solid or broken,
I’ll never pass this chipper trailer,
or see beyond its bulk to what’s ahead–
the road is what’s behind me, a furrow
I leave empty for the wind to sow,
traveling at a pace that’s not my own.
But then the sudden breeze that rained down wood chips
like cherry petals falling in a flurry,
chiding me as we climbed out of the valley.

_______________

Ember Garden

A man works a rake across the remains
of his burned house–a plot of twisted wire
and ash, thirty by forty on a cracked slab,
with half a chimney planted at one end,
keeping vigil like a faceless scarecrow.

Tending to the cinders, he bends at times
to pick up a fragment of his old life–
a knot of colored glass, a sharp angle
of charred china that shows a glimpse of vines
and pink blossoms still bright beneath the soot.
Some of the harvest is placed in a pocket;
most is tossed back to the patch of artifacts.

The gardener of relics relies
on geometry and thirty years
of sowed memories to guide his gleaning:
this is where the second story bedroom
came to rest, in that corner was the pantry
that became an oven the week before–
consuming all it held in a single night.

Two hour’s work on a late spring morning,
then it’s back into the truck and his present life,
the hotel, boxes and insurance papers.

He leaves behind a pair of lawn chairs
resting on the new grass near the orchard,
facing a stand of birch and the hills beyond.
All work is noble, but the morning is fine,
a perfect day for leisure, and they keep
their backs turned to the whole untidy business.

________________________________________________________________________________

Kevin Casey is the author of Ways to Make a Halo (Aldrich Press, 2018) and American Lotus, winner of the 2017 Kithara Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2018). And Waking… was published by Bottom Dog Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in Rust+Moth, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Connotation Press, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column ‘American Life in Poetry.’ For more, visit andwaking.com.

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August’s Featured Poet – Hiram Larew

Hiram Larew-

BACK TO ME

If only I was going towards someone
Who was the color of evening
Who would look back at me
Even from books far away
And remember all of this wonderful seeming.

What else would he remember —
The touch of what I haven’t said
Or the maps I’ve folded over?

What’s hard is going further along —
Trying to reach pure full in time
Or such adoring.

_______________

UNLESS UNTIL

You should get here just before you get here
When cups are still put away
And the soap is dry and waiting
When all of what I’m thinking of is half magic
Half a sort of danger
And empty vases shine like a gift
When birds out front don’t have any idea that you’re coming
But dance anyway
And the sky from here to there
Or even the edge of the world
For once matters deeply

I’ve always had a need for these kind of edges —
For anything that makes what is from what isn’t
Like people who never know fear
Or like pink next to gray
Or like logs stacked in the woods
I’ve always needed these kind of wavy lines
Deciding

I’ve decided that
Something has to happen
It has to
With everything this ready and wobbly
Here in the doorway that’s like you —
Either fate has to make good and come clean
Or I’ll just live in my beard.

_______________

DISTANCE

there —
what kind of advice
would we find
in hills
where
further than green
rounded on gone
our us seem to change

to ever

slopes —
our here hearts are found
deep
as wishes or starts
curved learning
hopes
almost like time
for folding

so —
how do we love
in this open
upward to skies
eyes bending
as go
with hands to a map
some old and touch new

by this making.

_______________

FROM HERE

I think of him as larger
Like what happens on a ship –
All looking out, yes, but not saying more,
With growing splits of light in clouds —
Bigger still than that
And through my bearings.

I think of him as looming on
And furthered,
Some maybe can’ts but surely tries
The never square
Off perfect.

I think of him in surprise —
The very wave that catches me
The sudden choice
And forward’s back –
My standing on this turning.

________________________________________________________________________________

Hiram Larew’s poems have most recently appeared in Honest Ulsterman, Amsterdam Quarterly, Every Day Poem, and Viator. He is a global food security specialist and lives in Maryland. On Facebook at “Hiram Larew, Poet.”

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July’s Featured Poet – Simon Perchik

Simon Perchik-

They have learned to feast
the way all blooms die out
return hours later, warmed

and under her breasts the low light
nourishes your fingers with shade
beginning again as twins –two tongues

two throats gutting each breath
below it one mouth
is filled with the other

that has no place else to go
weighs so little, pulled close
for the flowers that have nothing to do

with your hands barely in place
grown huge from covering the weeks
the days, years –with your eyes shut

–with this dampness taught not to sleep
push nothing away –with each hand
overflowing its banks and closing.

_______________

This stone bending over you
bulges with moons, craters
brought closer for more darkness

enlarged the way its arch
spreads out and gradually
a second horizon helps you track

how far before each night
gives up its faith in steppingstones
covers your grave

as if a footbridge this smooth
is as simple as turning a corner
hidden with hours and distances.

_______________

So there will be no distraction
you shower at night, your hands
kept cold as the same sound

snow breaks off bit by bit
whose only defense is to melt
and rock is now so rare

–the pebbles you saved
you bathe, hold under, hide
for hours in falling water

though there’s no light left
or the cry from your arms
around and around in pieces

half rain, half the sky
crushed against this frost
no longer burning or a place.

_______________

Before taking root this darkness
was hollow –you could hear its echo
become a second sun, half moonlight

half pole to pole as a single ocean
drained softly at night –at what depth
did it bend the Earth toward evenings

lengthen them, let your hand curve
the way sea birds still lift one wing
into morning and home –at what garden

was this shoreline born, leaving the sea
to itself, listening for flowers, islands
and in your arms its sadness.

_______________

It’s winter inside this string
kept white –on its own
to put your heart back

though each goodbye
returns to the surface
as ice and the sudden glow

that tightens knot after knot
the way this box was covered
with corners and step by step

and along a single finger
the blood you think is yours
is endless and sent.

________________________________________________________________________________

Simon Perchik’s poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere.

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February’s Featured Poet – Julia Travers

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Julia Travers-

E.

I miss when what I knew
was what you knew.
We shared most of our maps,
agreed to turn our flashlights on
in the dark crowd,
remembered where each other’s switches were.

We horded sunflowers, succulents and cilantro,
spoons, sweaters, moon rocks
and beach grass spurs.

We skirted chasms fell,
swam, climbed, floated.
You sprinkled water on seeds
I didn’t know I’d dropped
I carried stones
to encircle you while you napped.

We braided hair rubbed shoulders,
nodded, yes, shook heads, no,
Listened
on a leopard print couch,
while sewing stars together into shapes
for distant cultures to guess at.

_______________

April

Spring air rifts through.
As invisible hands close instinctively,
protectively, over my chest,
I am carried by my inhale
into a garden of muddy blossoms.

My child-self
stretches out from the branches,
where she was folded all winter,
waiting patiently with buds
and other potential things.

_______________

Crow

When the crow flies,
the air chokes around it;
it pushes outside of time.
When the crow calls
my eyes go quietly
and I wander below,
as if my steps were writing a fairy tale
and feel well positioned in the world.

_______________

For F.

I’ve read that particles behave differently,
depending on whether or not they are observed,
and that house plants blossom with attention.
Some things might not light up fully
if no one sees them,
or it might take a lot longer — too long,
or they may turn a different set of colors.
So thank you.

_______________

Easy on the Eyes

Books with characters
who say, three sheets to the wind,
well I never, and, you’re pulling my leg,
Grandparents’ crinkled voices exclaiming, oh, my stars,
a penny for your thoughts, or, gee whillickers!
These are the sayings that line the thrift store aisles
of our language.

Bend down low,
we’re gettin’ on like a house a’fire
for all the wrong reasons.
I’ve got a wild hair.
You’re the cat’s meow —
don’t go hurtin’ nobody.

Phrases are passwords through generations,
whispered between children holding hands in a chain.

Which expressions persist
by chance, habit, trend or sentimentality
seems sadly random.
I browse shelves of muted idioms,
my eyes glazed with a wide waft of appreciation.

As every living thing deserves,
may each one know:
before you died, you were read,
sure as sin.
You were heard, high and low,
and every which way.
You were seen
and were easy on the eyes.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia Travers is a writer, artist and teacher in Virginia. Her writing appears with OnBeing, Heron Tree Poetry Journal and Whurk Magazine, among other publications. Her writing portfolio can be found at jtravers.journoportfolio.com.

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January’s Featured Poet – Simon Perchik

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Simon Perchik-

Even the colors are anxious, carried
as if its new home above ground
would skimp the way all rows use dirt

cut in two with nothing in between
–you suddenly bring it a darkness
use one hand to comfort the other

though you’ve done all this before
have no faith in mornings :clumps
that want only to forget, just lie still

holding one end close, for a long time
sorted out and unfamiliar fields
taken place to place in flowers

in ribbons, string, thread, something
feeble, tied to the dissolving Earth
by this shadow and your arms.

_______________

This rotted log yes and no
longs for the stillness
that is not wood though you

are already inside, seated
at a table, a lamp, clinging
the way all light arrives alone

except for the enormous jaws
once shoreline closing in
without water or suddenness

–you lay down a small thing
and the Earth is surrounded, fed
slowly forehead to forehead again.

_______________

Though it gets dark earlier and earlier
you were already weakened at birth
–without a shrug let go things

the way each grave is graced
used to being slowly moved along
blossom and in your mouth

a somewhat pebble half fruit
half sweetened, not yet
broken apart in your throat

–you can’t make out where in the turn
you are clinging to its path
that led you here, not yet strong enough

or longing for some riverside or rain
or the night by night, warm
still falling off your hands.

_______________

You fold your arms the way this pasture
gnaws on the wooden fence
left standing in water –make a raft

though it’s these rotting staves
side by side that set the Earth on fire
with smoke rising from the ponds

as emptiness and ice –you dead
are winter now, need more wood
to breathe and from a single finger

point, warmed with ashes and lips
no longer brittle –under you
a gate is opened for the cold

and though there’s no sea you drink
from your hands where all tears blacken
–you can see yourself in the flames.

_______________

You drink from this hole
as if it once was water
became a sky then wider

–without a scratch make room
for driftwood breaking loose
from an old love song in ashes

carried everywhere on foot
as that ocean in your chest
overflowing close to the mouth

that’s tired from saying goodbye
–you dig the way the Earth
is lifted for hillsides and lips

grasping at the heart buried here
still flickering in throats and beacons
that no longer recede –from so far

every word you say owes something
to a song that has nothing left , drips
from your mouth as salt and more salt.

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Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The B Poems published by Poets Wear Prada, 2016. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

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December’s Featured Poet – Howie Good

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Howie Good-

Enter Ghost

So this is what happens when a loss of faith brings vertigo,
the synagogue is used as a stable, and you find yourself
at a wedding on the grounds of the State Lunatic Asylum,
with Al Jolson dancing the Paved X and Leisurely Looping Z
and death saying to you, “Sorry, we made a big mistake,”
but through it all, and despite bees getting depressed,
each silent silver snowflake falls in the exact right place.

_______________

Ctrl+Alt+Del

Light bled through,
filling eye-holes
with tar and ash,

conspiratorial winks,

the jagged shadows
of red autumn leaves.

_______________

Hi Hat

A woman’s straw hat, Pepto-Bismol pink,
skitters past sunbathers metastasizing
on towels and old blankets, whirls down

an empty stretch of white sand beach,
eager to escape, with the wind’s connivance,
the tedium of beautifying a size 71/2 head.

_______________

The Hitchhiker

He was sitting down to have a little lunch
along rural U.S. Highway 2, a major route

into and out of the oil patch, and this guy
drives up. He thought he was going to give him

a ride, and, as he approached the vehicle,
the guy pulls out his weapon and shoots him.

Just a week before, he’d left his parents’ house
in West Virginia to hitchhike across the country.

He told sheriff’s deputies he was writing a memoir
titled “Kindness in America.” It’s simple as that.

~Based on “Bail set after hitchhiker writing book on kindness shot near Glasgow,” Billings Gazette, June 10, 2012

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Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.

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November’s Featured Poet – Ralph Monday

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Ralph Monday-

Telegram to Wallace, Walt & Emily

I suppose I could have phoned, listened to the
Crack & hiss of ghost conversation. Talked about
white dresses, supreme fictions, slick body
electrics turned into Lennon’s Maharishi
inspired “Revolution.”

Or chatted about how busy you are licking
your wounds through Snapchat, a grammatically
incorrect text (Whitman would not mind),

or sex, or affairs with a married preacher, or
a high-browed old Christian woman who just
didn’t get it.

None of those: too dross, too trivial for shades
walking the underworld conversing with
Virgil & Dante.

Instead I sent an old fashioned telegram.
Thus the rosied lips of May carrying
meager pronouncements as a stone bears
moss.

I did not ask of the first rib,
immaculate conceptions,
a non-existent fruit never tasted.

I did not ask of death,
lazy Sunday mornings,
or the meaning of grass.

Instead, quaint tap tap tap
Morse code flown out on
yellowed paper to an
unknown address.

_______________

The Girl in the White Dress

The mirror, a silver moon,
conjures up the
girl from the settlement
town, scissored tan long legs
sweeping forward beneath the
thin, white dress, eating up the land,
the miles, dissolving behind her
whatever myth it is that she flees.

A stream of song lays her longing
behind her
like discarded lover’s clothes,
like an October without color,
enigma of knowing, of feeling
whether in the dark or light of
day.

Who loved who, or was there no love,
smear of truth, enigma of lies.
I can read her Morse code mind, tap tap
as she flees: streaks of mental text
flashed across the glass, that hurt, that bruise,
that laugh over wine.

I see her other side, the one she left, tangle
of truth & memory.
Pause & give me a moment. Pause but for
a clock tick. Then I would read your
iconography, your mythology.
I would know your landscape like no
other, the lines of you, architecture of
physical things, the terrible event
that tore you away.

This doesn’t have to remain in the deep
bone marrow. Let me give light,
the strange shimmer of the borealis.
Lie down in the road & let me kindle
the ashed fire.

Go with me to still waters and drink
mercy spun like silk from my fingertips.

_______________

The Word

I am woman they say.
I am mystery they say.
For I can undream the stone,
the sea, the sky.

Physics is the miracle of existence
which allows my actions,
eyeballing from every window, the ground
itself.

The universe doesn’t blare out in megaphone
bursts.

Three is a perfect number, a triangle perfect
structure.

As mystery, even I do not know the
ferryman of the dead.
Our maps do not matter.
The golden fleece can now be found
photoshopped on the net.

But I can trigger warning incantations—
how sapphire comes from flame
sound merely vibrations of the music
of the spheres, twisting waves like
DNA strands speaking reality by the
word.

This is my power—like gypsies
transforming my mind
to make me antique again as Paleolithic
rain, strip the patina of eons away
where the man-made ether has faded.

I am awake.
I am hungry.
I am the word.

_______________

Without a Mirror

He is driving on a road, maybe in the
Midwest, maybe the south, perhaps
somewhere in Colorado. He doesn’t
know, no one knows.

The moment unknown, everyone
forgets that Echo also flew from
Narcissus.

But on this road, somewhere, sometime,
crumpled newspapers tumbleweed
rolling, discarded gum wrappers,
rusted 1940s cars rejected like a lost
presidential campaign,

the same when love comes to an end, a
marriage severed by one lost in the
blood-red mists the

last day she lay on a ticking hospital
bed. It’s love that left, we’ll say
when you never returned to toll for the
dead.

So you drive, there with moon white
knuckles on the wheel, living with
ghosts.

When it happened the rain
was not white, not the clear
substance of young love
unspoiled by age, experience,
tragedy, but a

muted blaze dribbled across an
event horizon.

Past noise drips from your
ears where your wife
strides from the FM
on an old 50s song,

and like that flash
ordinariness bright
as spring mayapples

births the extraordinary
riding toward a rumored
future holding no more truth
than she holding the song in her
teeth, an
amateur propaganda team

like an old teacher behind a desk,
ruler in hand, so
that he says I have forgot
what time the purple grapes
come to juice.

I have forgot
drinking blackberry wine in the rain, the
wet streaming down your thin dress,

where love had not yet faded, as
now,
a partial language, incomplete pantomime.

_______________

The Mountain and the Man

There outside the window, the
bright sun, bitter cold, like a
sleeping eagle the mountain
towers up bare bones
exposed.

You can hear it wind
talking, tongue-like gullies
crusting its side, tromboned
muteness merely an aside
for the rock thoughts
coursing through the dirt
beneath, like some electronic
cyber chatter.

Though it knows nothing of the
generations of man, the rocky
behemoth has patiently endured
all the centuries of romantic
crumbling, ill-placed reason,
faithless religious mutterings
like some limestone and
granite Job

whistling in the dark
for an end, for man turned
to salt, ocean-burned
tears that no still-framed
movie can ever capture.

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Ralph Monday is a Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 100 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press. An e-book, Bergman’s Island & Other Poems is scheduled for publication by Poetry Repairs in Feb. of 2017.

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October’s Featured Poet – Joshua Medsker

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Joshua Medsker-

Purita

My spine still tingles
from the shock out of the sky
as I shoulder my guitar and set out
for the land of my unknown mentor.

The road is unclear. I must blaze trails
my ch’amakani has already beaten.
I cannot see them, so I must keep aware.

I must not long for the day I grab up my skull
and begin my practice

the road demands patience, and egoless
death, for the life-bringer.

_______________

Bullets

Joy is a luxury
I don’t have. Yet
I don’t believe in
giving in to despair.

So

where does that leave me?
With so many young, bulleted
bodies, their names bleed together,
and here I sit, impotent. Yet,

I have bullets of my own.
I craft them to their lethal points,
and pray with each salvo,
that I get closer to my targets.

_______________

Perfecto

My elbows squeak familiar. Slip
my new arms into old skin.
Wrist scars re-framed
by black cuffs, worn
upturned collar protects me from
dark weather.

Sweat smell and dirt stirring my loves
back to life.

It wears heavy, but I believe
I am ready, now, for the weight.

____________________________________________________________________________________