Tag: poem

Amnesty Week | R.J. Lambert

Blizzards in July. 
Or was it June? Soon 
the sun would glaze 

our snowflaked 
lashes, eyelids like little crowns 
peering down upon 

the unmanicured grounds. 
(Our lakeside trailer lot.) 
In fairness, my inner child 

could in no way 
have observed to manicure 
as a landscape verb. 

I’ve thought a lot 
on what to do, 
contingency to 

prevent resale. Set it all 
on fire or drag it off. 
Doors locked, the foil 

in one side window 
like a silver tooth 
flashing a worthless grin. 

I swear, all the houses 
in that town 
look like an old man 

bent over, praying. 
One might have thought 
electrical & heat were on. 

No water, dry pipes, 
some human urine 
in the yard. 

The thing nobody knows 
is that a hoarder’s house 
is mostly mail, 

pages from magazines, 
old workout machines. 
Movies seem fake, 

like it would take 
a mental break, 
a bottle & a half 

of some off-label pills, 
a line of coke. 
No joke, it only took 

a childhood in the church. 
My grandma cutting 
naked women’s bodies 

from an art textbook. 
These days, the temptation 
of Christ might just be 

like you & me: 
not getting ourselves up, 
poor at picking up after, 

failing to put things right 
back. The picked-over library 
shelves are sharp like Jesus’ 

rib cage, its hinges showing 
through the artificial brown grain. 
Received another email 

& dates are overdue: 
It’s amnesty: return your books 
today for free. 

 

About the Author:

To Brother-Ghost on Halloween | Pell Williams

The last time we trick o’ treated
you were 14 and 6’2, too tall 
for your skeleton costume. Remember?
The leg bones didn’t quite reach. 
I was still a kid, so you humored me,
donned the black cloak (now calf length),
elongated mask with black eye holes,
plastic fake-blood chest piece.
I loved that it pumped pink dye 
with a squeeze of the trigger hidden
in your sleeve. No one gave you candy,
just gawked at your height. “Aren’t
you a little old —” so I took extras. 
You never let me hold your hand
but patted me thrice on the noggin.

We had just moved to Mt Pleasant. 
The rich neighbors, so protective of
their sour patch kids, never did take off 
their fancy costumes. Not after Halloween, 
not even when we began to melt 
into the scenery. I babysat their fat 
toddlers, you mowed their perfect lawns. 
We played man-hunt with their teens,
who you outran. I hid until they forgot 
I was playing. You’d pluck me 
from an oak or crawl-space around 1 am,
walk me home in the yellow streetlight 
your shadow swallowing mine. 
They stopped inviting us. 

Little ironies. With lawn mower gasoline, 
at 16, you lit yourself on fire 
in the parking lot of Academic Magnet: 
you’d worked so hard to get in.
Magnet accepted me too, your char mark 
fresh on the sidewalk. I said no.
You’d just bought our mother oven mitts. 
The note you left in your beater car, 
the car I drove the next ten years, 
I still haven’t read. But I’ve kept 
the scraps of paper you used 
to teach me the Pythagorean theorem.

In the Augusta Burn Center, 
your final costume was a mummy suit.
I couldn’t even pat your head.
I said goodbye to one unwrapped finger. 
It was my idea to cremate you. 
Wasn’t that the obvious choice? 
Now I ask your unhoused soul:
do you wish sometimes we’d kept 
your bones? They were so very long.

 

About the Author:

Why We Cry | Matt Mason

You came into this world
with your eyes wide open,

which I didn’t think babies were supposed to do,
but you

have always been a little different, your cheeks
bigger than heartbeats,

your heart
a harvest moon wide across skies.

Your mom and I just drove you three hours
to move you into a dorm room—

away from us, not a camp,
not a trip with your aunt,

we have to fill out forms now and get your signature
to help you if you get sick,

there’s a new address
if we want to reach you.

It’s an unrecognizable world,
an unrecognizable house,

no mugs with dry tea bags stuck inside them
left on random spaces like clues to a mystery,

no guitar played soft from your room at night,
sketches scattered on tables, it

doesn’t sound like a lot of weight, but,
without it, this house

drifts on its foundation, bends
in the wingbeats of hummingbirds outside,

it feels like if I were to stop crying,
teardrops like sandbags,

this home
would float

away.

Poem in Celebration of My Death | Matt Mason

There’s a statue of Saint Francis
outside my window. Frank,
as I call him, wears a sparrow on one sleeve
though he stares not at that small marvel
but out at the trees: the peach
that I planted, out
to the woods beyond, oak and maple
and sumac and cedar and honeysuckle,
beautiful labels that try to excuse some of them
for their invasiveness, their non-nativeness.
Frank is non-native here.
I, also, am an invasive species.
I hang on, making up names
for the trees, the birds, for ornamental concrete decorative holiness.
Forgive me, Frank,
for the pathways I wear into these woods, you
disappear under vines,
invite the landscape in to warm you,
I don’t yet have
that kind of confidence, but
I get closer every day, grow
into a new
inevitable
name.

About the Author:

“For Kenny” | Kelsey Smoot

Kenny is an aberration.
One of two white men I’ve ever met
who makes me feel safe.
He grips me tight upon arrival. 
Tears off a small bud of rosemary
from his garden.
Holds it to my nose and asks
“ain’t that nice?”
in a pitch and tenor
that sounds like a bear cub yawn. 
Kenny dances like a fairy.
Clunks around his kitchen 
in heavy hiking boots.
Prepares pan fried steak 
and spicy cabbage.
Sucks at the grizzle of meat 
and tells us,
if he ever choked on it, 
he’d be happy
because that’s “the rich man’s way to die.”
Kenny is dirt poor. 
Wears it on him like high-end cologne.
Tells me stories of his Petersburg blood.
He laughs at his own southern-boy-blues—
how, comin’ up,
he thought the clock 
in the Richmond train station
was Big Ben. 
I wonder if it’s foul
that the best black-eyed peas I ever ate
were cooked by this white boy’s hands.
I wonder how he put so much soul 
in those peas.
How he got so much soul in his soul.
Kenny comes home from work
covered in a thick coat of dirt 
from shoulders to ankle.
He tells me his mentee 
makes five dollars more
because he ain’t a fairy. 
He rolls tobacco, and squints into the sun.
Says, “but ya know…
ya know how the world is, Kels.”
I’m not sure that I do.

 

“For Kenny” by Kelsey Smoot was the Winner of the 2023 HoneyBee Prize for Poetry selected by Rodrigo Toscano. Here’s what Mr. Toscano had to say about “For Kenny”:

Too often these days, poems either lack sufficient words or phrases that culturally locate a text, or worse, they are overstuffed with such cultural markers. “For Kenny”, strikes a compelling balance between the two extremes. While the poem is plainly sympathetic to the subject of its portraiture (“Kenny”), it doesn’t lapse into simplistic sentimentality. A stoic attitude pervades the whole piece. And it is by way of this moral-ethical distancing that the reader is given space to imagine scenarios in their own life that call out for poetic treatment. But not so fast! Despite the poem’s narrative drive, expressed by an ardent commitment to finely wrought detail, akin to the beginning of a great epic novel, the last line, “I’m not sure that I do”, separates this poem from the legions of wannabe novelettes that litter most poetry journals. The cathectic rupture caused by the line is instant and irreversible, and resets all that came before it as an unrecoverable alternate reality. That is, our grimy readerly hands are kept at bay, as the poetic subject, narrator, and reader are all tossed up into midair. And where we land is on a newfound desire to live a more observant, more judicious, and ultimately, more compassionate life. And of course, “For Kenny”, leaves us plenty hungry for more poetic works by Kelsey Smoot.

More about the author, Kelsey Smoot: