Poetry – Page 4 – swamp pink

SWITCHBLADE

January 27, 2026

grand jury refuses to indict ham sandwich throwing itself at federal agent jailhouse snitch sez she was offered pills a grand piano for favorable testimony her husband is a baby he went to hell jefferson market clocktower where we bump, tickle the wire thick scrotal sacks mulled over for days

CONTRAPASTORAL

January 27, 2026

When you find me prone, enumerating  mosses or observing  a banana slug’s trek  up redwood, know I’ve turned, sighing,  from the great works  of men, dumped like the moldering couch beside a county road;  renounced language,  all misunderstanding;  shook off the cobwebs of names. So little of  me isn’t plastic, glass,  concrete. What am I,  on my knees, without the squawking I took     for words? A dragonfly  hovers here in the air,  ...

“Come to Ottawa. It’s Serious Fun.”

January 27, 2026

I remember everything. The house. Woods. Creek. My car, egged. Things I never told my parents. Sounds of a coyote killing a rabbit in the dead of night. My body drive-by egged off Gentleman Road on Halloween. The kids on the bus in elementary shouting I was gunna blow them up. And if not me, then my brothers. A hand-drawn picture of a gorilla passed around in...

Allegiance: this strange tenderness

January 27, 2026

for my generation. Not our malls, but the way we burned CDs, passed songs from hand to hand. Has it been so long? a friend says as we scroll through first and last names on our reunion invitation: a mental parade of kindergarten grins, pre-teen braces, chemistry goggles, a few blank mysteries. I confess my backward yearning for the routine...

Prayer During Winter Solstice

January 27, 2026

traveling south on a steely stretch of highway another Texas winter draws sweat from my lip yellowing fields & a big sky, painfully blue a swallowing expanse without a single cloud cows scatter in fields muzzle-deep in the sweetgrass & like these creatures I have gained a sort of freedom a little box of quiet, mine for two...

SEVEN OF CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI’S OPERE MUSICALI ARE LOST

January 27, 2026

Quite different from the Filippo Lippi fresco We saw yesterday in Scarperia, which really Wasn’t but had been thought was, but was Never lost because to become lost you have To be ready to become found and if not ready, Then you’re lost forever, until you’re ready, The time we were on the archeological dig In Jerusalem and everyone kept bumming My Winston-Salem’s, my forlornness had Sunk...

FLOR NUBE

January 27, 2026

searched the sky, no sound, coyote hung in a tree by hindlegs you are given glimpses of heaven, rarity, later will it be much different tulle, entity like trees, planetary, heard only the air before I’d thought of layers, waves, sky unsegmented go where you unpiece, which connects vibrancy of force and mending, we are under clouds which...

LOYAL

January 27, 2026

I used two hands I used none. looked through the trees, imagined myself similar, incongruent. I wasn’t surprised I had said. no, nobody thought of what unbinds itself. radiant, I whispered to nothing and in it nothing beamed.

[And perhaps / she of startling sight]

January 13, 2026

And perhapsshe of startling sight sees light from [ hearts break so the light can ] summer hea rt bitter and clear sun speed rot run deep in soil [ the heart moves slow ] heaven over heaven overabundance move me away – towards – against the world pop of pain as crocus follicles break s kin & bloom sick wide open stay o pen [ may we be happy without hope ] days in fantasy rarely return antidivination: me aning meaning is a chance event let me...

DON’T NOBODY PISS ME OFF BETTER THAN MYSELF

January 13, 2026

There’s a painted bird on the wall and no love in my bed. Don’t nobody see what go down here, smoking out the window, a Muse-like voice counting all the ways I spill over myself. I wanna get free. My hair ain’t combed, I ain’t talked to my mama in two weeks months, there’s a Panera bag next to the couch full of an old me I don’t want no more. My altar only got one Southern face...

My Everything,

January 13, 2026

Reading convinces me authors are puppeteered by history when writing about love. Why do they treat love as perfection worthy of gods? A crazy habit when in history fickle men attained one-sided love because women fell knowingly to their charms! Vijaya used Kuveni to usurp power and banish the natives. Seeta suffered a trial by...

Come winter, I will remember your warmth

January 13, 2026

When the river burst its banks, I traced the base of the mountain with willow roots. Today, the locusts came in, took off with what is theirs and left what is mine, in the end, nothing. I turned into a great, permeable log. Green birds glided through in granular sizes. The wind made a flute of my body, singing: Am I useful...