Super excited to have poems published today at Little Notes Lit Mag! Check it out!🎊
Free-stock photo courtesy of Cristian Escobar at unsplash.com.
They’re great to work with and a nice place to share your latest writing; consider sending some poems, fiction, or essays. More details at: clickety-click.
Without further ado, my poems!
“Raccoon”
My happiest moment
last month
was when I splurged
on a vinyl sticker,
3 x 3 inches: the raccoon
rollerblades
while staring stun-gunned
over his right shoulder
asking
What is even
happening? It’s a question
I feel like we’re all living.
The raccoon’s tail
is lush in the sketch,
his two paws with claws held out front
of the holographic backdrop:
a sleepwalking move
or about to bust into dance,
it’s hard to tell which.
But I’m here for it, I’m here
deciding where to put it.
***
“What to Call It”
blobby bubbles
of dye in water
I’m not sure what
to call it, this hour-
glass toy made of
plastic, but
the purple separates
into pink then
into blue
then back to viscous purple
the pink slightly
less than bubblegum
the blue slightly
more than bluebird
they blend
how do they blend
what makes them but a hand
that upends them
from the bottom pan to float back
into watery figure-eight space, satisfying
as marbles clacking on tile
or boot-crunch on packed snow
the short-lived pleasure somehow
prolonged, brought back anew
each time
there is a niece and the niece says
she had one a few months ago
that broke and the aunt’s mother
also had one before the millennium
so we both buy one again, this trinket
under five dollars at the big-box store
but it’s just a palm-held toy
the niece and aunt spot together
in an unassuming cardboard box
on a bottom shelf
something tiny, over-simple technology
really, this is now remarkable,
this gets to us
this toy now sits on my desk
between my modem and my desk lamp
and I think each time I twirl it
end over end and then see
bubbles spin and descend
as I know they’ll spin and descend
of my niece’s, of my niece,
I think of how pleasing it is
to have a niece and then,
huzzah!, a little over
two years later, another,
not babies anymore, now tweens
I think how pleasing this toy
that does one thing and
one thing only: it’s tipped over,
it’s turned upright again,
the blobby bubbles part
then accumulate without haste
like all the unhurried hours
of childhood brought back
***
“Slow Living”
The caption sentences onscreen
read charmingly like the analogies
I remember studying nervously
from a thumb-worn paper workbook
as a teen studying for SATs:
The window is a frame, the sky is the masterpiece.
There is balance that slows the mind as my mind
rereads it as if yanking on a piece of speckled yarn
though nothing unravels, no sleeve comes apart
instead
there is faint, jaunty piano music.
Generic jingling, not to step on any toes, but also
quite perfect: medium blue and a spillage of scattered
clouds you could almost scoop up in your arms
if you opened the diner window
where clear, freshly-washed cups await
overturned on bisque saucers, perfect in their patience.
This window never made for stepping right into, of course,
this life that is someone else’s life on a screen
and yet so warmly ours—for ten or fifteen minutes,
as wide, welcoming, and chosen
as a pair of open arms after coming in from brusque cold
before pressing some buttons, before walking back out again.
