⭐
“And God,
please let the deer
on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.
Let the moths in porch lights
go some place
with a thousand suns,
that taste like sugar
and get swallowed whole.
May the mice
in oil and glue
have forever dry, warm fur
and full bellies.
If I am killed
for simply living,
let death be kinder
than man.”
― Althea Davis
Feb 8, 2024
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🎣
I love this poem so much and I hope you all find something very beautiful in your bodies today.
__________
All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.
Mar 27, 2024
📜
was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opioids.
Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral
though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing
before a casket with a princess motif.
Some moments can’t be eased
and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.
When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens
for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire
inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want
an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred
sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,
always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.
Feb 12, 2025
⭐
Is it all that we wanted?
This longing.
I'd rather be dead than hungry.
I'd rather be destitute than fed.
The river bed is dry and I'm weary,
It takes a man years to float
Where the water's
Few and far between.
Like touching a wild animal.
Arroyo in my desert where the love should be.
I bathe in sand and loss
And hawks flying through.
Nothing to own
Or some wanting to prosper.
Only the Sun burning-
Hungry and wailing
To get to you.
Jan 10, 2025
