Thank you to Mark Antony Rossi of Ariel Chart for publishing two of my poems today.

Vivian In Her Dressing Gown

  She weaves across the room,

wearing the shade of lilac, silk,

after a night of flamboyant festivity.

 

Her larynx chilled and stilled

until she has drunk her coffee before the mirror.

There’s a massive punch of hangover still in her head.

She’s one of the fermentationally advantaged,

with some of the squirmiest kidneys on the block.

 

She’s feeling faintly ashamed;

as faint as shame can feel without being nonexistent,

while she slogs through a sloppy compaction of memory.

 

There’s faint images through that brain fog,

of a good time had by all, 

as they behaved like a rambunctious platoon on leave,

and she with her hair swinging,

like a windblown colt as she danced into the dawn,

while her company tried to pull down the house.

 

But this morning, she’s still unsold on sobriety,

and she makes no other answer to the challenge 

that perhaps enough is enough,

than to pick up her jolly dust pan,

and sweep up every clue that last night was overdone.

The Tears That Flew Me Home

  

While I was across the ocean, 

a golden bird I saw.

To that one bird’s voice were added many.

The cacophony caused within me such little effect.

 

Yet, when I heard the Nightingale’s lamentable tone,

so powerful, so beautiful,

so sudden a change came.

 

No flaxen wings sit upon the body of this bird,

brown and hidden in the night.

His melody, the only evidence he exists.

He gets a frozen bill after finding his mate,

but his song continues to speak to me,

and the feeling of what I missed most

sits upon my lashes.

 

There is no such bird in my country,

only the memory of the tears that flew me back home.