The Poetry Marathon

A sharp smack

stinging cheek, a print

deep red, throbbing,

cold shock and hot pulse

and my throat closes.

I feel it burn,

hot and sick and bright in my chest,

raging, any words

turning to cinder in my mouth,

but eyes dry, cold, and aching.

You have beat with me since the first month. Danced, broke, healed, scarred,

beared with, carried, and punished me every second, every moment I breathed, you beat on.

You’ve raced at a lover’s touch or slowed to a low crooning song, ached when I grieved

and hurt when things fell apart. But because of you, I am healthy, dancing, moving,

getting stronger, getting tougher, and though you race for the sweet moments and crave

the kind words, it isn’t beauty that keeps us strong. You fight through the pain, the metaphorical

heart working with the literal brain, and perfect aorta, vena cava, pumping and pulsing and quietly

drumming along as I run, run, run long-legged, as I stand, as I fall, beating and working and letting me breathe. Until we are dust and you have gone bust, because of you, I live. 

Thick soles thmp down against asphalt,

continual stride, long-legged, steady,

as a full moon hangs through thin cloud sheets

beckoning to tired eyes the coming home.

I am a catalog of genes, and someone lost the index.

Blue eyes, brown hair(not too long, thick, dense) hips

and thighs for running short distances, a laugh that

someone says is like an aunt, a smile that was braced in,

a nose straight, soft, long lashes, mesomorphic basic

amalgation of genes messily slotted and categorized

a pinch of this and that, a mouth that talks and a smile

that crinkles the nose and a body I punish for crimes

I committed in grief, in self-pity, and I swallow my pride

and just look at me. Look at the insecurities and

see the pride, the shame, the joy, the grief, the pain.

I am what my mama’s mama made, and yet I am me.

A new beginning,
a soft night lulls us here, now,
and there is just us.

There was a crash–

a fire, a deadly cat on the loose,

power outage, rabid dog,

locusts, a hurricane,

My heart, oh god!

Why? Why what?

I am so late, why

did I agree

on waking up 

at an unholy hour

for this natural disaster

that we call this life?

Deep, low, the timber and pitch wraps around my mind
and if you looked in the dim greys of my mind, you’d see
a bright spark of light, and that’s my darlin.
A voice like coffee, a bright note and depth
that I would sink into and listen to for hours. The patient measure
of breath over a phone line, and I can feel the smile,
as he listens, and then the reply, soft and deep
and I fall again, just listening. A soft song is sung
to tease a smile out of me as the hours pass.
But there are words that tremor through the line, through my voice.
Not spoken, but heard, through time, between each breath.
I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

Fifteen, a rare, precious, peach-skin thin age,
with a ticket to fly out, far away from home.
A few months gone across the sea, to the Isle of Green.
Work in a shop, in a foreign land, with friends.
But twisted in a toxic relationship, hands like vines
that said, “I don’t want to let you go, you’re mine.”
How much a life would have changed from a no to a yes,
if I had gone across the sea
Ten years earlier than I did for me.

A weight in my arms, the first moment I held her I knew.
She was so small, delicate, a fairy’s child with deep blue eyes
that even from the first breath held a world’s knowing.
Rare and precious thing, serene in a chaos of noise and sound,
little angel child whom I carried in my heart for years.
A soul with a mother’s years of whispered wants and ambitions,
sweetened with temperance and time, a father’s love and hope,
twining me close with fingers as delicate as a sigh.
A dream waiting to be born, a hope and a kindred soul
crossing the void of the threshold and calling, calling.

He comes to me sometimes.
Every now and then, a tap on my shoulder,
a whisper through the door.
I remember watching the light dim in a cat’s eyes,
smoothing his fur one last time, and turning to him.
“Did he feel pain? Does he forgive me?”
And he merely smiles, and turns away.
He always had the answers. I held all the questions.
I have given him gifts through the years,
blessed him with my children, cried with my flowers.
But in the end, though the children grew old in his arms,
and the flowers faded to dust in his hands,
in the end he received them all, tokens of my love
in the many small and broken things.
That life has always loved death, for the beauty of the temporary,
the mortal, and forgotten. In his arms, forever, eternal.