10 Oct

Poetry – 2 Poems by Jess Falkenhagen


Nevertheless

“A woman alone rows across the lake. Her life is intact, but what she thought could never be taken has been taken.”
From Blue Hour by Carolyn Forche

It is what
you do not expect
that ends up shattering you
The surprise,
more than anything else
The crush of broken trust
the small bird
silently nurtured
balanced in the palm of a hand suddenly strangled
the tiny broken bones
countless feathers
falling through fingers

A life built stone by stone
baby by baby
year by year
and then one innocent summer day,
a terrible fire
that is not an accident
but arson
and everything buried in ash

and years later, you still wake up with the smell
of smoke in your hair
impossible to get away from the stench of it still
no matter that all has been rebuilt
and better now than it ever was
the smoke still hovers and chokes
some days

Nevertheless,
you smile again
and laugh
but you cannot un-
remember

A gash bone deep
never fully mends,
it becomes a scar that aches in the blue dawn
and flashes raining sorrow
while you pretend to listen at a dinner party

prairie girl

Quietly refusing to get wet or sandy,
she sits on the shore in the shade .
Not swimming in the Caribbean blue sea,
by choice.

A willowy, slender stalk
playing Celtic carols on viola by firelight.
Hiding under wide brimmed hat and book
observing
discerning
making
by hand.
Intuiting what hand-
work
means.

A curled sea shell
A bell
clear and solemn

attentive
not easily swayed by the bright lights

Preferring a simple cross,
the archaic ritual,
a small slice of pie.

__________________
Jess Falkenhagen

Jess Falkenhagen lives with her husband and 4 children in an old adobe house at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Northern New Mexico. She has a background in Cultural Anthropology and reads an enormous quantity of memoir, travel literature, ethnography and poetry. She has been to 41 countries and has been proudly social media free since 1973.

03 Oct

Poetry – 2 Poems by Ricardo Moran

Two Poems by Ricardo Moran

 

One Note

This street has one note.

Its beat
taps on angry tongues.
Its tempo
thuds in cars of glue and tape.
Its chorus of blackbirds
propels overhead.

By day, it drives
tree branches to suicide,
where birds flee
to stunted vistas,
and poppies pull out
their roots
to seek sanctuary
in mediocrity.

By night,
this
one
note
embraces
unlit streets,
ugly liquor stores,
auto shops circled
in barbed wire
of gunfire.

Its churches praise it at 420,
with the body of Christ
in one hand,
and a Twinkie,
in the other.

This street is short on vision,
and long
on
this
one
damn
note.

 

I’ve Lost All My Tread

At the wheel,
the driver has fallen asleep
and I, melt against the passenger seat,
my hand reaching for the ignition key.

Your tongue, your cacophony
of how bad things are,
pushes on the accelerator.

I listen to your dirges grow louder,
whose songs and rhythms
of fear
have San Cristobal scrambling
off the dashboard.

The car swerves
to the far right,
to a cliff,

and this fuckin’ seat belt
won’t release.

The thinning hair
on my head,
these splinters
of tread,
cannot protect me
from the wall
before me.

I tug at the door
jammed, locked
with memories.

My arms cross over
my face.
I shut my eyes.
Then,
silence.

 

_______________
Ricardo Moran
www.ricardomoranwriter.com

Ricardo Moran was one of 12 finalists in the We Need Diverse Books picture book contest in 2017. In 2020, he received the Peter K. Hixson Memorial Award for Poetry. Additionally, he sits on the board of the San Diego Writers Ink, and is also a member of the Nebraska Writers Guild where he often communes with the spirit of Willa Cather at Red Cloud. You can find him at: www.ricardomoranwriter.com