On the bus and off again, feeling better

Have you ever gotten on a city bus in a bad mood and got off in a good one? Here's a recent poem of mine about that experience, published in the 2013 Chaffin Journal, out of Eastern Kentucky University. 

MORNING BUS

As you step down into the weather again,

remember to thank the taxpayers

who helped get you there,

the people behind the scenes

who worked out routes and schedules,

the driver, who drove,

the people using walkers,

the people taking up two spaces

all by themselves,

the mothers with children in strollers,

the jittery students in wet shoes and earbuds

who all got on and found a place to sit,

room to stand, a strap to hang from,

expanded like yeasty dough into each

niche and crevice, kept the pressure on

until they squeezed that gray bubble

of old age you woke with

up into your throat and out

like a baby's burp.

On climate change, highway litter, love notes and Tibetan flags . . . .

Here are two recent poems of mine, related by environmental theme and loose lines of irregular length. C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag published them in its Fall 2013 issue. "Prayer Flag" appears here in a slightly revised version. C4 is an on-line and print journal based in Boston, at http://chamberfour.com/


 BEYOND THE TIPPING POINT

The summer it was no longer possible
to deny what we'd done

the roses were particularly beautiful
everyone said so
the mornings bright and calm
the nights starry

and parents and grandparents
came unmoored from long marriages
and dated and went steady like adolescents
and broke up and went steady again

writing love notes in pencil on lined paper
and doodling arabesques and spider webs in the margins
folding and unfolding and refolding the sheets
to read them over and over.


PRAYER FLAGS

Unaccountably they lift my spirits,
these plastic grocery bags the color of old teeth,
caught in fence wire, blown to tatters
by the patient prairie wind

thirteen thousand miles
from mountains where Tibetan flags
blue, white, red, green, and yellow,
shake blessing on the world.

Here's a poem of mine in "Split Rock Review"

Split Rock Review is an on-line magazine out of Duluth. The editors recently published this poem of mine, whose title roughly translates from the Latin as "A Defense of His Life." Hope you like it. See it in the magazine at  http://www.splitrockreview.org/aplogiaprovitasua.

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

When I’m dead and scattered,

say I didn’t video class reunions,

hoard photos or hang on

to drafts of all my poems. Say 

I was in the present as the present fell 

away from itself. I found 

a good used Stanley plane today,

bought groceries . . .  And already

memory’s down to the etceteras,

so quick the present, like a comet

that sheds its disappearing tail,

like ginkgoes that all at once

go soft at the stems, and the leaves

separate and blanket the ground.

Say I was a good composter,

that I raked that yellow shining

into armfuls for the black bin

in whose moist, wormy dirt

the future lies, and dropped it in.

Free State Review: a fresh new magazine

I've been reviewing literary magazines for New Pages for a while now, including some old standbys and some newcomers. I've never been as excited about a new one as I am about Free State Review, out of Annapolis, MD. See what I've said about the second issue here.