Backbone > Poetica

To be generous is to be divine and wildly layered, a rocky, rushing tributary of the cosmos that ultimately flows back into your own soul, extending deadlines and framing fingerpaintings. Don't we all stretch to reach at some point? Enjoy the sun. —Franci

Sonnet of Paolo

I am not sorrowful but only exhausted
Angered by my plight but I don't fear it
Not sorrowful, O no, I'm not repentant
As my skin burns away like so much wax
I pay dear for the wench for whom I lusted
Yes, I took Francesca for a lover
And for it I roast now on spit of flux
For we betrayed, her husband, my brother.
Her breasts, her thighs, her pubis become to me
As I reflect on secret ways of love
The shadow of a phantom utterly
Silence is best in the void of forever
With freight of malicious hate the serpents bite
And sight of paradise in hell is price thereof.

-Roger Whitson

Saturday Morning at the Union Gospel Mission

grey men
bundle out

the front door

breath and cigarette smoke
swirls

a white fog
around wrinkled
faces

as they tote Hefty
bags of aluminum

up Lancaster
for redemption

-Sheryl L. Nelms

We are not soulmates, You and I
I know that You know this too
It is unspoken between Us
I used to be so free with that term
Oh, he must be your soulmate
Someday you will meet your soulmate
Someone who fits like puzzle pieces with me

This was before I knew me
Now that I know me
I like to finish my own sentences
I don't particularly want to fit everytime
The perfect tuck, that led to the wayward fuck

We are more like a folded blanket
Loosely draped over One and Other
Neatly creased in all the others
Which is good because I used to,
Before I met you,
Mostly lie on the bed in a rumpled mess

-Ann Elizabeth Byrne

After ANWR

Of course no one in New York was excited
when they discovered oil
beneath Central Park.

The various Natives,
like the Manhatten Islanders,
the Bronxers and Harlemites
were concerned about the pigeons
and the bums

their daily migration
from the park to the dumpsters,
they-being the pigeons and the homeless-
would be disturbed by the drilling

The last of the reserves
in
Texas, the gulf of Mexico, and Alaska
had long been sucked dry

the wild horses, the manatees, and the caribou
gone

The Natives drew a line in the concrete
Central Park was sacred land

There would be no drilling there
not ever
Central Park was sacred land.

-Don J. Rearden