My Poetry Published Today at Little Notes Lit Mag 🎊

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.