February - Poem 25

Neighbors / Kristine Anderson

Three of us in the parking lot
to charge phones in our cars
having shoveled out
after the plow went through
following yesterday’s snowstorm.
Still no electricity in our homes.
“I have extra batteries,” one neighbor offers,
“if they’ll work for your flashlight,”
and he trudges through the slush to fetch them for me.
A family lugs bags of clothes to their van.
They’re taking off to stay with relatives
who have lights and heat and warm food at home.
Before getting in the van, they ask me quietly,
“Will you check on Henry next door? It’s so cold.”

Henry, 86, returns with the promised batteries.
“I’m good,” he says when I ask. He points to his heavy
coat. “I wear this inside, too.” He shrugs. “Besides,
today’s sunny. The condo’s warming up.”

A teenage neighbor slows his bicycle through the puddles
of melting ice. “Hi!” he says as he rolls by.
Then he adds, shivering a bit, “It’s cold!”
Yep, I nod, and think,
but it’s getting warmer by the minute.

Presence  / Barbara Audet

    Dedicated to Ed

I often hear your voice though the room is quiet.
It starts as a whisper not in my ear but near my eyes.
Like a knowing breath nudging at facial corners, sounding
Resounding, untapped from an ordained rendezvous.
Aligned with no scent of you, just a breeze of you,
for the purpose I conjecture to connect us once more.
And what do you whisper in these logic-loosing talks?
Encouragement, occasionally. Advice, more often.
Is is for me you call or for you, to keep alive in some way,
Substance supernatural to forego death’s true nature.
Even as these words untangle themselves, I hear you
Reading over my shoulder, I feel your weight on my collar.
And I sense you will read them over after I have gone to sleep.

HOMEGROWN ABACUS / Ashby Logan Hill

At the light, I was reminded what magic grows of mountains.
My father’s tomatoes holding on like stone fruit on the wiry vines,
tent-pole stake and string-bent bulbs below the cherries,
sweet one hundreds, romas and other valley-ancient heirlooms.
We’d fry up some Jubilees and Green Zebras in cornmeal mix,
all turned over in garlic butter and buttermilk and dropped
in crackling, smoky-hot safflower oil. My cast iron mind was mine,
dark and sparkling like the morning sunrise.  “I’d seen God
up there in the sky draped above the pillowing, billowed hills,”
I told you, pink gleam of cirrus slipstream. The birds chirped me
again awake although I didn’t want to have to wait.  But I’d wait
for the night all night to whisper then sneak outside with a flashlight
to begin my arithmetic. I’d had just a few hours before first light.
At dawn I’d find the foxes lurking, smiling at my counting.

Asserveration  / Amy Marques

Positively demanding

asserveration: a swarming

anticipation 

of questions:

Whom to have been?

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

What the flub!  / Sonia Sophia Sura

Flub!
What the flub!
The most beautiful
word in my vocabulary
is not glorp or glob
or blob or gleeb…
The most beautiful word
is flub.
Flub! Beautiful indeed.
I once lived with an artist
who lived with anger quite
not sparingly; he expressed
his emotions 
rather
untamedly…
Well, once he took a liking
to my word,
nothing was ever as
serious as it could be!
“What the flub!” He’d
say as he stormed around the place…
Why, it was quite fun…
Here he was, with
anger expressed
in a silly way; He came
to almost adore it.
“Holy flub!”
is my sacred way of 
expressing reverence,
“That’s flubbed!”
is my way of
expressing condolences,
and
“You flubbernutter!”
is the greatest
insult I could give.
As I use this word,
it spreads across the lands…
Nicole in Florida 
tells me she’s using
it around her friends.
She has her own
rules and preferences…

Someday, I can only dream,
this word will reach
the millions!
No more road rage!
No more violence!
Learn to express yourself,
and make it fun!
Join the motion!
Just say 
“Flub!”

Death of a Suburban Dog  / Samuel Spencer

It’s a labor just to hold up
your heavy head, and yet you rise
on those old, frail, wobbly dog legs

to say hello.

You were in the kitchen, the furthest
room from the living room. Why?

When dogs die, they leave the ones
they love. Why do they wander away?
Is it so they can die in peace? Is it
so they can acquit themselves those last
few pitiful pets? Or, is it so they can spare
us from seeing them stiff without the life
they freely gave?

Why were you in the kitchen, Benji?

Don’t you know if you want to go
we have to let you? Don’t you know
we’ll never have the strength? Don’t you
know we’re not dogs like you,
and we don’t know how

to say goodbye?

Benji?