Brown eyes and coughed sighs
I’m staring at you.
Not because I like you,
But because you took my heart
and
I
don’t
know
how
to
get
it………..back.
The Beat – Prompt Four
Butterflies flutter
Bees sting
Sit down chile
While I do my thing
Swaying to the music in my head
Not reggae, salsa or hip hop
Instead
A beat so strong it will raise the roof
Percussion, cymbals and melodic flutes
Youi’ll think I was trained at Juliard
When I leave you behind by a hundred yards
You’ll scream when you see me move my feet
And rock out to this imaginary beat
In my head.
INDY DAY
The end of May when all the cars show up
at the Speedway,
preliminary races entertain the crowd,
warming up the beaten track
and smells of rubber fill the nostrils;
car lovers live for this day as the sounds
of motors shake the stands
and people get excited
when they hear the sounds
and smell the smells of race day
in Indianapolis.
Michellia D. Wilson 8/13/2016
5 A Brave Front
I’m trying to maintain a brave front.
But continuous pummeling, left and right,
will leave anyone with a dampened spirit,
downtrodden at that.
There’s a heaviness I can’t explain, darkened clouds hovering
a silent howling.
The better part of me keeps on reminding me, this will pass,
this is a fleeting moment, there’s a rainbow at the end of a storm,
and so on and so forth.
These made me stronger, resolute, firmer
and PRAYERS lots and lots of them,
to maintain that brave front.
They
She met him at the park or maybe online, or at the drugstore
picking up Rogaine for her husband and tampons for the girls
or in a chat room for SWM/SWW or Married seeking Same
or maybe she scoured other cesspool classifieds or Petrie dish dating sites of lies and lingerie,
But she found him or he found her writing their stories in pointy prose, sexy texts,
and after the first time, it was as good as it gets
without getting too much, without getting out of hand
not the same hands they hold now in their sleep,
his calloused around the nubs of the forefinger and thumb, hers picked at the edges
alone each in their separate beds dreaming–next to their rightful owners
joined hands locked intertwining the air waves
while the unsuspecting breathe another’s treacherous desire.
FIVE
At the top of the fence
across the meadow
a curl of wire lies crushed
beneath the alder spilled
from its stand in November
and still unrepaired come May
though the bear cubs ascend
the slender ramp in furry romp
watched by the huffing sow
attending grass and sedge,
hunger pressed tight to her ribs
where spring carved
a twin-cub hollow
fierce as a melting glacier,
the promise of summer berries
and purloined apples in her milk
as she splays her black bulk
against the old cottonwood
to invite the cubs down
from their frolic, away from wire,
away from un-neighborly fences,
from the noise and wounds they contain.
© j.i. kleinberg
Itching
One July day Karen and I took a walk in the woods. Summer friends since our days as kindergarteners a decade before, things had changed. Karen had changed. Sister of my best friend David, her tomboy ways with fishing poles and bait, canoes, axes and snakes had added visual allure while losing none of her outdoors prowess. Our walking took us into Cleo’s woods, where there was an old log we knew in a clearing of the pine needle path. All of us Horseshoe Lake kids, in various configurations had long used it as a bench to sit on and talk. I had used it in solitude countless times to sit, absorb whatever the Minnesota North woods wanted to soak me with. Sights, sounds, aromas; Mother Nature always with something to say, I was always a good listener.
The day that Karen and I took the walk started out like most others discussing grandparents, fishing, stuff. Having walked these woods countless times, we knew every bend in the trail, every decaying stump, every skylight-break in the pine canopy. The long-ago felled tree lie in the clearing, as it had for years. We sat, we talked, I casually picked up a couple of acorns and threw them at eavesdropping chipmunks, causing them to chatter at me while scampering away and causing Karen to kiss me or maybe I kissed her, then suddenly she was sitting on my lap but then we fell off the log.
Reflexively thrusting my arms back, I was able to brace myself, stopping at a teeter; my legs draped over the log, my butt on the ground, both hands flattened out with fingers pointing backwards. I did not drop Karen, and she laughed – at falling of the log, my awkward posture, my kissing. Who knows. We stayed that way for a while as there was no reason not to.
An hour later, back at the house, fondly remembering the afternoon, I noticed the telltale rash and felt the familiar itch on the inside of my forearms. Sitting there, legs dangling over that log, with Karen on my lap, my arms had been braced firmly behind me in a patch of poison ivy. The resulting discomfort of a few days quelled by Fels-Naptha soap and Calamine lotion, though the puzzled questioning from adults inquiring how “You got poison ivy THERE” seemed only understood by Cleo, who laughingly reminded me as he had for years, that I was welcome to walk – and stop – in his woods anytime I wanted.
Even after all these years, it is an itch I still want to scratch.
Mark L. Lucker
© 2016
Placed
you may find me off balance and STILL, still I place myself in familiar and STILL, still I place myself in unfamiliar and STILL, still I am placed