Tag: Poetry Spring 2023

The Day Mother Died Mother drapes her armacross her face.Opens her blue eyesone last timeas if to say goodbye. I leavethe hospital. Mywife holding her handtells me to say Ilove you in the phone.— Danny P. Barbare resides in Greenville, SC. He loves to travel to the Blue Ridge especially in autumn when the leaves…

Branding Beyond the fence, the next farm over,a roan cow and her newly hot-ironed babymow down the green summer blades.By the backyard pool,raw vyshyvanka patternsSergei’s bare calf,crosshatched like burlap. His body continuesto stretch into collage:a Converse starnooked into his ankle,a blue-yellowed tridentspanning his bicep. War broke out months ago.Today sun pierces downand I cannonball.A wave…

The Poem in the Middle of Everything Sometimes I know the way by heart without the poem. I know how to move past the moonlight in the night sky coming up over the mountains by morning. I am walking with time at my back and fan palm trees full of fronds, green as summer, swaying…

A Night with Chopin and Liszt I don’t remember the name of the soloist Though it possibly could have been the Latin word For glowing hands, radiant fingers, as we heard A performance by a maestro, not to be missed Nocturnes, mazurkas, impossible to resist Even the dour but poignant Funeral March, the third Movement…

Jesus was a Cuban Revolutionary I was awoken from my misery by Che Guevara’s iris his face plastered, on fabric and non-precious metals, reminiscent of another Well, the Cesare Borgia degradation of the same man and he was just a man Read Guerrilla Warfare and The New Testament forgot which was which The Son of…

I feel like a drink in the morning when I think you’re gone which never comes. You call eventually. This is stuff of school-child fantasy, but now I am beginning to love you, it’s not about keeping you. The abandoned bridge, the peeling bark adorned by scarcely a flower recall the single place I never…

The Stage Is Still Ours Another day sitting at the bar, a draught resting in my hand waiting for the curtain to rise and our show to begin. the old stomping ground hasn’t changed in thirty-five years. Just older, more worn, and more wrinkles on the leather stools, matching the afternoon clientele. Mid-afternoon the same…

CEMETERY SANDS Soldiers buried upright with their helmets exposed – barrel cacti cluster in platoons. OVER THE EDGE The table cloth travels beyondits absolute parallel with the table,and it rejoices! feeling curves and wrinklesinstead of linear attention —even draping toward the floorin gleeful balance before gravity pulls,and it crumples on the floor with maybeone more…

Cusp It’s the moment before you turn the page,dog-eared corner poised between thumband forefinger, the anticipatory shudderof a horse’s flesh just before the fly lands.Sun still high, the breeze – cat whiskeron goosefeather – prompts a flock into flight.Summer is a bowl of blackberries eaten,seeds still stuck in your teeth. The Forgotten Memory is the…