Coming out of the deep freeze

I’m stuck, your cluttered hands doing
the uncultured work as the sun goes down.
What you take as my vow
is just the fissures they allow.
Would you take this sky to be one waking up or one closing down?
You shine like a perfect instrument in a dentist’s tray,
So far away from any surgeon’s table
Where they root around root canals
Looking banal at any cavities to be found.
Tonight will be a murder mystery
but it will have no casualties.
I would love to love you till you stay,
But I can’t do anything but worship the skin that’s leaving today.
The air only holds a typecast moon
twinkling over my biggest truth:
I will lose you.

It’s only a matter of
when and why
how and who
Questions appear before the answers
if you know the screenwriter as well as I do.
Your shy rehearsed lines,
Your bandaged-up body like miniature Russian dolls.
I’ll pull apart the different strands of you
and find where the real woman lies.
Is she stranded between the clock hands that can never find its final hour,
just existing,
Ticking along unaware of the cost of all this lost time?
Please come beneath me,
under those warm arches.
You will never be understood.
Time’s arrow marches forward.
That’s a lie.
I am as lost as the hours we invested in.
It’s all true.
You’re no longer that beacon of hope you were when I first met you,
but you’re still as hungry as when you gave me that first devouring look.
You switch this off somehow
But tell me now:
What will it take from me to bring this back to life?

Freshen

There’s no drive here to make me sane
Or let me sleep,
There are no fingernails vacant enough to descale this pipe life dream,
hanging by a thread on a three-network plan out of reach.
A teenager taunting and dangling a young kid over the bannisters as we speak
The teachers aren’t listening
as the wardens take their payments and don’t dare to catch him.
Pastel paints at the start of a new week.

Before medicine alley

Trying to be grown up whilst the toys are all broken
And the truth is hidden under the guise of ‘I’m just joking’.
My face buried under the weight of a shop-bought angel cake:
Watch it being sliced so delicately,
watch it being wasted on the deities who shun my confectionary
with their dietary legalese.
Still, I’ll drink this substitute dry,
leather lips like hissing possums
running rings around athletic tracks of the academy’s playing pitch
A coach who looks in my eyes, and begs them not to crack under the lines
To jeopardize his personal record timing prize

There’ll be no more deterrents to the most natural of highs.

Whale Watching

In the writers room
Concocting alibis far too sweet for the likes of me,
can you hold that wavering pen and write what I see?
I fear pen and paper is a method I can no longer feel
I feel that breathing is a trick that’s no longer real.
I’ll turn as white as the scrunched-up paper in your hand,
Your dress hung like ribbons,
concealing the only part of you that’s really here.
What are the objectives?
These cloudy mists we write of the hand of a lost judge
passing judgement on a criminal syndicate of which we are all part of

What I hear from the side of the road
is moving parts of engines all about to explode.
To make it blow
What would you do for me?
I like my sanctuary,
my writers retreat,
My baseless study when I can study from a distance
What makes you you
What makes me me
It’s a banana skin slip of possibilities
You were always the type to blot my lipstick,
Pout my courage, purge my skin,
to commit this sin
You’d have to be truly loveless
We’re not there yet.
Now I want to blot you out,
pure ammunition for the page,
A poet’s imitation of a child in fear.

If life is a stage that what does that make us, my dear?
Maybe the cleaners?
I think we’re more than that, but you’ll just sit there
inventing reasons to clean up someone else’s mess.
Let them deal with that themselves
You think of all the lonesome cries for help no one has listened to yet.
Leave the milk turning sour on the shelf
You think we’re Van Gogh’s ear cauterized in a tin of Heinz beans.
Beautiful spirits frail and weak yet to be seen
I think we are as doomed as the great zombies of Nicholson Street
I think we are the beat of a national anthem for a country that doesn’t exist
Paper and glue,
We have no rhythm.
Hang a wall high
stick it back together again.
Draw a border with
a start
a middle
an end.

It was signed by a list of men who hold declarations with no ambition
Under the covers they will make amends.
To have sex with their ghosts you just need to use that well fostered imagination.
You just need to close your eyes and forget about the reality of the situation
You just need to remember that every devastation for them had already happened,
You hold a match that had already been lit
Where do you throw the useless flint
Where do you put its ruthless glint?

Foreign continents, new constituents
Bed-pan parliaments,
Writing for a living,
kissing Euripides on his scarlet cheek.
He falls under the curtain in the Aegean sea,
I see seals on tour in Aberdeen.
The boat driver sold me the fantasy of whales
Well, I blub a tale.

“Have you written all that?”
“Yes”
Exhale.
More power in dead writers than a west coast gale.

 Lily Thomson lives in Edinburgh. Her work explores themes of identity, alienation, travel and intimacy, and has been published in Five on the Fifth, The Honest Ulsterman, Agora and One Hand Clapping amongst others. She is a previous winner of the Sophia Jex Blake essay prize.

Hangovers

A world-wide experience–
Perhaps cave dwellers
quaffed remedies like mastodon blood
for the pain of sloshing down boozes.
The Roman poet Pliny–ate fried canaries,
raw owls eggs – but died of fumes from Pompeii.
Birds may be the key – the Assyrians
in the time of the cruel Sennacherib,
who was certainly a drunk, chewed
ground bird beaks mixed with myrrh.
In medieval times, maybe even the monks
slurped raw eels and cracked bitter almonds.
Placidly the Chinese sipped green tea – and still do.
Maybe the worst, Mongolians recovered with pickled sheep’s eyes.
But the Japanese only pickled savoury plums.
The good old Wild West – Prairie oysters, raw egg yolks
Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, salt, and pepper.
A football player I knew slugged down five yolks daily
before he was thrown off the team.
You might want to avoid Puerto Rican bars,
cuz of their preventive deodorant—
lemon slices under armpits.
Bloody Marys are quite common now,
but Hemingway downed Bloody Beer.
I’m sure there are many more, maybe you have a favourite?

But if you’re a lush, a souse, a binger,
no matter– none of them work.
So you’re sitting at your special bar
or home with your favourite elixirs.
You know, you know, damn well you know–
The best and only cure is to cork the bottle.
Good luck!

History of Spanking

Mrs. Furness, my second grade teacher,
long dead now, told my mother,
“If I believed in geniuses, he is one.”
Made me her pet, skinny me, buck teeth,
owl glasses, unruly cowlick,
left in charge of the class
when Mrs. F. went to the Ladies Room.

Watched over her desk, stopped
kids from messing around.
Janie did, despite my protests,
stuck out her tongue.
Class clown, tipped over
the inkwell on all the papers,
fled to her desk just in time.

“Who did this!.” screeched Mrs. F.
“Who did this!,” spit my name.

I was mute. Janie and the class
prayed I would not tattle.

What would the kids do?
Push me off the monkey bars?
Flip me off the Teeter-Totter?
Refuse to play?
Billy once spit on Stuart.

Mrs. F., arms akimbo, glared:
“Either you tell who
or I call your Father.”
Terror squeaked out, ”Janie.”

She dragged her up front,
flashed her ruler, whipped her,
ripped her dress,
sent her to the office,
the class yelled, cried, glared.

It is said: Spare the rod, spoil the child.
And they spanked, switched
and whipped, even beat
until Dr. Spock—the Dr. Seuss for butts—
said: Wrong thing to do.

In Texas, they allow paddling again.
Triumphant Mrs. F., arms akimbo,
smiles down from above.

Late Night Martini Talk

In 1981, a noted editor,
martini under a small lamp,
yawned, turned the manuscript over,
snapped off the light,
Took the last sip, tongued the olive,
went to bed, after signing
the letter informing
Gabriel Marquez his story
submitted to the New Yorker
would not be accepted.

Marquez won the Nobel Prize in ’82.
I suspect that same editor
is now quietly sipping a martini
by that same lamp, intoning,“I fucking
rejected, Gabriel Marquez,”
nodding, “I fucking…”

My story was rejected by said mag
last year. I suspect martinis ahead
for another poor fool.

Legions of Angels

Though many think Him deranged,
insane—healed lepers, walked on water,
dispelled demons, raised his friend
from the dead, then, the same for Him,
most would not call Jesus a liar.
Intimate with attending angels ,
famished and broken in the desert
when they rushed to minister to Him

He responded to Pilate—
If He asked the Father,
God would send forth
twelve legions of angels,
(approximately 5,000 x 12 = 60,000),
to rescue Him right then and there,
eschew the blood and pain and death
of the old rugged Cross—
was He scared or out of His mind?

Instead, if He spoke Truth—
indeed, when released to return,
He will be joined by those angelic Beings—
horses charging from the sky,
brandishing swords and fire.
Understand the difference
between Truth and falsehood,
between reality and illusion
and know that a great cloud of witnesses
will burst forth with legions and legions
of angels and others—soon.

Cornucopia

You can’t slip and fall on sunshine.
Wagon trains never go East.
Weeds don’t know they’re weeds.
I didn’t know flowers went to Heaven.
Nailing my heart to the roof of my mind.
Bull in a china shop and you are the china.
Shoving toothpicks into the cuticle of your soul.
Sludge of a different colour.
My life is so much thinner than thick.
I was annoyed at the moon.
There is no punctuation in dreams.
Eventually it is naked and sags.
The comedic timing of an owl.
Everything has a penultimate day,
even The End Of The World.

Vern Fein is a retired teacher and community organiser of outreaches to those in need who has decided to write now because Vern has the time and strong inclination to do so. Vern has published a number of poems and short non-fiction pieces.

Lions fire from the ochre riverbed,
you stand in white among the sun trees,
you dress in linen sand,
burnt perfume and your red furs
linger on the river air,
you arise on a ladder of clear stones
to gather fragrant branches,
you silver thread the light on water.
I seek the dynasties of your silence,
a drop of my lamp oil falls
like a water bead on the shard of a mirror
resembling the cenotaph of a queen.

John Swain lives in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, France.  His most recent chapbook, The Daymark, was published by Origami Poems Project. 

You can find more of John’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Back in Business

Time to sit on my porch,
read the newspaper.

The sun is well into
its spring U-turn,
sends warm rays of regret
for its winter absence.

A bee lands
on a breeze-tossed petal,
induces a golden butterfly
to join him.

Dogs no longer just walk
with their masters.
They seek out each other,
circling and sniffing.

A mockingbird
on a rooftop
advertises his wares
in borrowed song.

Windows open.
Chimneys are silent at last.

It’s the season
when my fancy demands
it be turned to something.
Not love, necessarily.
Lazing’s a good second choice.

Like Father, Like Son

A father, Frank
going straight after a long history
of drug offences –

and a son, Matt
out on bail
after a stash of cocaine
discovered in his car by cops –

that’s the family scene,
the one where Matt
sneaks in and out of the house

or stays up in his room,
eats his meals alone

and then,
when they do run into each other,
their tongues freeze up

but two pairs of hard angry eyes
make contact,

as they both look deep
into each other,
see the same festering hungers,
the same wretched desires,
the same pathetic appetites
that adulterate the family blood –

and they turn away in a shame
disguised as a superiority –

“he’s turning out
just like me,” thinks Frank –

“I’m turning out
just like him,” thinks Matt –

from the disgusted looks
on both their faces

you would never know
they just agreed on something.

These Fine Children

They are perfect,
middle of the night
sleeping,
middle of the day,
thumping volleyballs
across a net.
Their faces are
pure and lovely,
just like yours
at that age.
The photos
on your dresser
are a history
of how these
moments came to be:
your sly glance
through the
slightly ajar bedroom door,
your full face
at the parlour window.
God’s creation?
Maybe.
Your creation?
Is there any doubt.
At night,
alone at the kitchen table,
coffee and a cigarette,
a bottle of pain pills…
if only their father
were alive to see this.
For all their glory,
triumphs know
their place.

Flowers for a Friend

The river’s all dolled up,
with the sheen of skyscraper lights,
some stars sprinkled here and there –
the Hudson must be on its way
to someplace special.

Your face flashes out of all others
like a sudden appointment I’ve forgotten to miss,
and the sirens – God, the sirens –
it’s the sound of cops looking for something to do.

Someone (you?) says something.
It’s hard to tell in a crowd.
But I listen.
And I believe.

A woman’s selling flowers
that are so outrageously perfumed,
like they’ve been reading French novels
and wanted everyone to know.

I buy a bunch,
hand them to you.
You take them like you’re accepting
a bill you already know you can’t pay.
The river keeps going.
We don’t.
Not yet.

Passerby

You bring me pleasure.
Ironic that.
You could be a harpy,
a bigot, a child murderer,
for all I know.

You could be fool enough
to think that
a lovely face,
long straw-coloured hair,
a lithesome figure
in a fluttering blue cotton dress
is enough.
Let me tell you.
It is enough.

Yes, in my friends,
I want all the virtues.
But I look for beauty in my strangers.

Someone in the Fog

The fog is thick
but I can just make out a person
up ahead of me.
Not the features,
just the shape.
Not the way of living,
just the presence.
I see what must be a head
but not the knowledge.
And a torso
but no scars.
Limbs
but not what they bear up.
I’ve just reached an understanding
of who and what I am.
But with other people,
the fog rolls in.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Novus and Calliope. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.

You can find more of John’s work here on Ink Pantry.

I have spent years
warding off evil from my chest.
I’m convinced that my heart —
once plump, pulping,
and dramatically impaled
by Cupid’s bow —
has since flattened
into a planchette.

I drag my planchette heart
across ouija boards —
and spell out your name
though I’ve buried you
a thousand times.
More incantations:
“R u here?”
“I still <3 u.”
“Gimme a sign.”

Not that you answer.
I swallow the sting
of my séance
being seen-zoned.

Arshi Mortuza is a writer and educator residing in the Greater Toronto Area. She is the author of One Minute Past Midnight and Pressed Flower. Her work has been featured in numerous literary outlets worldwide.  

When the tomorrow
comes as a light at first,
and in the dark the darkness burns,
it explodes in flower loops
your soul.
Without seeing,
without waiting!
This autumn
shares fruit scent,
even though the type is pushing towards winter,
the leaves fall,
when the loops are ready to be born.
Without seeing,
without waiting!
I touch this autumn,
it burns my hand
and the day becomes sad.
When I smell
I feel a spring breeze.
Without seeing,
without waiting!

Nikollë Loka was born in Mirdita on March 25, 1960; graduated as a teacher at Luigj Gurakuqi University of Shkodra; master’s degree in pedagogy at the University of Tirana, doctorate in history of education at the University of Tirana. Author of ten poetic volumes in Albanian and three poetic volumes in Italian (two of which with co-authors); included in the anthology “La Poesie contemporaine albanaise”, “L’Hartmattan” publications, Paris 2024. In addition to Albanian, his poems have been published in Italian, English, French, German, Arabic, Romanian, Swedish and Macedonian. Winner of several literary awards in the country and abroad. Included in the Lexicon of Albanian writers 1501-2001, editions “Faik Konica”, Pristina 2003 and in the Encyclopedia of Italian language poets, “Aletti Editore” Rome 2021.

You can find more of Nikollë’s work here on Ink Pantry.

The Squirrel

I thought the squirrel had died inside the tree so I poked at it
with a stick. It didn’t move, so I poked inside the hollow
I thought it was trapped in, poked it again. Something grabbed my stick
tugged it with teeth and tiny hands, and so I pulled
the stick back out. Weeks later

three tiny tails snaked out of the hole next to the first squirrel’s
twisted and wrapped around their mother’s tail as though
they had to cling to her even out here. I never saw
their little faces, never saw anything but the tails
growing thicker and redder and fluffier with each day.
The mother would only come out at night
to gather food for them, I never saw her leave her post.
I spread crackers with peanut butter for her in the kitchen
carefully placing them just below her nest as an offering
a plea for forgiveness.

One morning, all four tails were gone. The hollow
gaped at me, abandoned, from my old birch tree.
I put more crackers in the garden, put them in the branches
near the hollow, chased stray cats from my yard and
kept the dog inside, but I never got to see those little squirrel children
never got to see who had made their first home in my yard.

The Mouse

My husband calls me into the kitchen to show me the mouse
that has fallen into the sink during the night. “I think it’s dead,” he says
just as it begins paddling half-heartedly in the water once more
one last, futile effort to find some purchase on the slick porcelain basin
one impossible final effort. Its eyes are dull, flat, black
minutes from the end. I reach down into the water,
pull the little creature up by its tail
take it outside. “Make sure it’s dead,” calls my husband from the house

not wanting to be a part of whatever I have planned. The mouse
struggles feebly in my hand. Its eyes don’t see me. I have never
seen eyes like that before, half goggled, oblivious
like two dull nail heads jammed into its face.
I carefully set it down in the garden, place its feet on the dirt
let go of its tail. “Please don’t come back,” I whisper
as it struggles for life, for balance
before springing off into the undergrowth.

“Please don’t come back.”

The Myth of Correspondence

To fully understand the pictures I have sent you
first, fill a bathtub with water and ice
get into the tub with all of your clothes on.
Only then should you shake these photographs out
of this careful assemblage of paper.

This is the only way you’ll be able to understand
the shades of weather that separate us, the only way
to separate yourself from your envelope
of tropical breezes and permanent sunshine.
I will speak to you through the ice bruising your skin
a frigid wraith clinging to you from too far away.

Tuesday

On a perfect day, I would be able to open my back door
find nothing but jungle waiting for me, sunshine filtered in through the leaves
of trees I’d never seen before, the calls of unfamiliar birds coming at me from all angles.
On a perfect day, I would hear snakes in the undergrowth,
monsters rustling just out of sight
hear the low rumble of a tiger or a jaguar breathing a warning shot
close by, perhaps as close as the cooling shade beneath my back porch.

But this is not a perfect day, and I have not been transported
to a random scene from a Kipling novel, have not been transported back in time
to march with Herodotus or Alexander through lush jungles untouched by civil war
am not looking for new species of birds with Audubon
or stumbling into and through the ruins of Machu Picchu with Bingham.
I am just digging holes in my own back yard for tulips and daffodils
wishing I could be anyone but me.

Mouse Trap

The little mice watch me from their prison of tin and plexiglass
inside the live mouse trap I baited the night before. Four little mice
with pointed noses and trembling whiskers
eyes black and bulging against their dark brown fur.
I wonder how I must appear to them, this giant thing
that they spend their days avoiding, rushing from one dark corner
to another at the sound of my footsteps, and now
there’s nowhere left to go, they wandered into this baited box
and now I have them in my curious grasp.

I tap on the little plexiglass window and they
rush to the corners of the box,
cram themselves into the entrance chute, their thin black tails
twitching and curling, hanging out in the open. I imagine
what it would be like to keep them as pets, these stinky little mice
what it would be like to train these wild mice to live in a cage
to eat only when food is offered, and only what I alone offer them
if eventually, they would learn to anticipate my arrival
at the door of their cage with joy, or if
they would always be just as terrified of me as this?

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Talking River, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and the Indiana Writers Center.

You can find more of Holly’s work here on Ink Pantry.

unchanged

it never really changes

that scratchy transistor
still sounds the same
to the ears of the past
hidden under the cover
of a late night wish

and you refuse to believe
that the cornstalks
are any shorter
that the dirt is drier
than it was last summer

and meanwhile the snow piles up
and regardless of month
you remember peering out the windshield
from your backseat vantage
listening to your mother swerve the wheel
cussing the march and the gravel

and all of this is the same
as yesterday
as tomorrow
when you believed the last gasp
was the ending word

but now that frozen moment
is less than a footnote
on your approaching obsolescence
or so it would seem
as you sit here
refusing to recognize the moment
for all it is

Timeline

We were told
all of this before
as we reveled in the
static existence that
permeated the pavement,
and every day
meant something,
except for the ones
left in the background;
signposts that always said:
Try Again,
and we did,
because what else
is there to do
when all you’ve got
is everything,
but all you see
is nothing?

We were told
all of this before,
but things like that
rarely matter
when today is
the only day,
and what has changed
but a dented perspective,
and you had this pocketknife,
and that was enough
in the hazy moment.

We were told
all of this before,
crunching earth that advised
walk slowly, walk steady,
so we ran,
and one day
we’ll rest.

Retrospect on the Wind

There were late night moments
of ritualistic abandon,
throwing everything to the fire;
caution being the first to go.

We’d see the twinkling darkened windows
from a vantage of impossible distance,
never knowing what was
on the other side of that black glass,
only that it had to be something grander
than the place from which we came.

Things would burn down,
ashes collecting at the bottom
of a rusted-out fifty-five-gallon drum,
and all within a radius breathed in
the noxious odour of something
that never should have been.

A single struggling streetlight
told the shadowy tale of
every other busted out arc sodium dream,
and we believed all those soundless words
with an innocent fervor never to be matched.

Sometimes in the still midnight of now,
you can hear a wind shoot through trees,
even a lone coyote calling to the gathering,
but just beneath all of that,
you might hear all the things
we never said.

At the Core

There’s a quiet spot
deep inside of nothing,
underneath everything,

hiding, waiting to be found;
a centre to be exhumed,
but only from within,

and that’s the trick, isn’t it?:
to dig out the intention
from underneath the extensions,

to explode from a
position of implosion.
There is a quiet spot,

and it’s there, breathing, waiting,
knowing that time is irrelevant,
that the wind never fails;

believing that calm will come,
and it’s only to be found
beyond the next breath.

how it is

to all extant
you see a sideways world
turning in some
unimaginable cycle
unpredictable and disturbing

you watch from your
suspiciously rounded corner
an acknowledgement of nothing
a promise of everything

and yet
the circles swirl
the world knows
and you’ll remain in the dark
seeing through pinholes
and pretending they’re stars

your perception an image
from a coffee can camera
of yesterday’s embellishment
undulating and roiling and nauseous

but that’s only what happened
yesterday
and tomorrow is less than a dream
and today’s already half in a book
that’s already begun
to smoulder in the wet flames
of anything that ever
seemed to make sense

James Benger is the author of several books of poetry and prose. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Writers Place, and on the Riverfront Readings Committee, and is the founder of the 365 Poems in 365 Days online workshop. He lives in Kansas City with his wife and children.

Frequencies
for Mary Walker Graham

I.

“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air. Yet
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.

II.

As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.

Adam Fieled is a writer based in Philadelphia. His books include Opera Bufa, Beams, Equations, Apparition Poems, and the manuscript-in-progress Something Solid. A magna cum laude Penn grad, he edits P.F.S. Post.

You can find more of Adam’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Apple Juice Love

Aging brings loss, but sweetness persists
Love is pressed from what endures

Life, a ripe apple—
Red Delicious,
rumour of hell,
bittersweet to the core.
If you can taste it with
& chew it with false teeth.
Most friends have vanished—
ghosts slipping beyond
shadowed, silent doors.
That parlour where no returns.
It’s only a rumour.
Yet, I wander the garden,
fields stripped of grace,
grapes foot pressed into concord—
faith fermenting in the barrel
of hidden old gospel & songs.
Kneeling in this season of loss.
Lies the tartness of redemption.
While others (wheeled) wield the devil’s
fork in the heat of their own fires.
So, squeeze what sweetness remains,
press me—
last sweetness.
In your apple juice jar of love.

I Conceal My Craft

An armadillo symbolizes guarded creativity
This poem contrasts self-protection with vulnerability

I conceal my craft beneath my shell.
Mine of an armadillo, snug in its embrace,
nestled near its warmth,
as insects buzz under the midday sun,
where stories collide with struggles,
and words fester like unresolved thoughts,
distant from the critics’ needle pen hearts.
Their relentless demands, cold cash,
and hollow praise layered thick with honey
on pages between verses, where every line
holds a lingering scent or memory.
I gaze up at the vast sky and chuckle.
Speaking in tongues nervously out of mind
shining chimes waiting for the next critic
to declare my thoughts don’t flow,
out of character, my rhythm’s a misstep.
I tally each word, joy, and sorrow.
One poem, one collection of verses for me;
One poem, one collection, a poetry book against me.
Breathe shallow, breathe hard for the heart with age.
I conceal my craft under the armour of the armadillo.

Dove Bar Poem

In this short poem relationship differences
create distance and longing

An ex-lover told me she loved
Dove dark chocolate bars.
Dove bars were suitable for lovers.
She ate dark Dove bars.
I ate light Dove milk chocolate.
She was healthy; I was sad.
We often got into fights over this.
She was manic, and I was depressive.
Sex was a bouncing basketball affair.
She was healthy, not knowing her disease.
I was sad, stealing apples.
Swiped from Farmer John’s orchard.
Sleeping wherever
I found a pillow.
A pillow wherever found.

Tonight, Tonight

This poem embraces solace in moonlight
trusting dawn’s gentle promise

Tonight, I am the moon’s envoy,
bare feet awash in silver.
Longing settles in me—
spark or ember, I remain.
Thunder soft as cat paws,
storms now gentle memory.
I flutter, no longer afraid,
teaching darkness to move gently.
Tonight, I find comfort
in the moon’s borrowed light,
trusting dawn will come.

Michael Lee Johnson lived in Canada for ten years during the Vietnam era. Today, he is a poet in the greater Chicagoland area, IL. He has 418-plus YouTube poetry videos. Michael Lee Johnson is an internationally published poet in 47 countries, a song lyricist with several published poetry books, and a nominee for 8 Pushcart Prize awards and 8 Best of the Net nominations. He has over 710 published poems. He is the editor-in-chief of three poetry anthologies, all of which are available on Amazon, and has authored several poetry books and chapbooks. Michael has administered and created 6 Facebook poetry groups. Member of the Illinois State Poetry Society: http://www.illinoispoets.org/ and Poets & Writers: https://www.pw.org/.  His poems have been translated into several foreign languages. Awards/Contests: International Award of Excellence ‘Citta’ Del Galateo-Antonio De Ferrariis XI Edition 2024 Milan, Italy-Poetry. Poem, Michael Lee Johnson, “If I Were Young Again.”  Please consider me for a Best of the Net or Pushcart nomination.

You can find more of Michael’s work here on Ink Pantry.