Issue 10 - September 2008 - Poetry

Frozen by Drew Anderson

When I woke up, he was gone.

Last night manifested itself in the ash,
the stubs of his cigarettes.
The faint echo of the chords he strummed,
resounding through the empty space
as the morning awoke.

A plastic cup, an empty bottle,
the remains of his goofy smile.
My shirt still smells like him.

Smokey memories of blurred conversation.
Inebriated romance and slurred kisses,
a shot glass of lonely.

He made the right decision.

My Second Person by Jamie Baxter

I felt like a king in my cold shower,
When from the flames I’d saved you both,
When I could have had my way,
When I wanted to drag from the ash
Just one of you.
Because we are symmetrical;
This is no kaleidoscope
Where one eye breaks into one thousand,
We are two eyes reflected.

      I can still smell the burning hair,
You both kissed me.
I can still feel the treads in my cheeks.
I have taken a plaster cast and stolen
Just one pair of lips.
I feel your tread on my cheek
And I smell your hair.
I’m in my shower
Washing off the ash and plaster.

Hollow Night by Tennyson Horn

When all I could was but to sit on the shore
Grasping my hair, whimpering and alone,
And then lie down in the tide hoping for a shark
And listening to the undulating roar of the Water
Sedating my loony bin body and mind—

I couldn't but help think—At least it's mine.

I understand... by Katie Winny

I understand that you are 
   illustrated?

   Maybe you lost the forest in a boat,
and the boat shared your legs 
    with the water. But honestly, stranger,
you're only more beautiful

   for it. Can you see your own
throaty canyon, widened smoky hills?
   Can you see the jet-trills? bubbling along
envelope crease-lines - I've seen them. I've seen your writing in
the muscular swallow of the sky and the 
flat, grisly shore-breast, and

   how it
runs down 
slipping, jaw-clench
Vulcan faces
displaces rhyme to the bruised places. Can you 

     see? it's halting the toothy faucet-drip 
   in someone's cold sink. It's unpicking a 
smile in cottony cheeks, it's slipping significance under 
blue. Someone at your side is a 
cupped silence, someone lives
         next to your wordbrick towers
     rains on your sonnet flowers
and quenches your splitting land like a tongue
to paper, palms on salty water. In all of this I want to

ask it: where's the smoke-sign dedication? where's 
   the Morse-code dripping, dit-dash replies to
     trickle down your smile again?
   well here comes the rain, here it comes. Here it comes,
I understand, I do, I 

   understand that the slide of light across your face
      means poetry; under your watch,
        faces learn to search for beauty. I understand the 
   inside-out of the colder ink, your dripping sink, and
the playground on your doorstep, with one cherry-foot
in the hall, I understand

   that you are illustrated,
                and I think it suits you.

 

© Read This Magazine 2008.