Every Thursday I will be sharing three poems from either unpublished/in progress works or books that have already been published. Free libraries and small bookstores please get in touch if you want FREE copies of my books.
This is a poem from an upcoming collection entitled 'Lighting Saints On Fire To Ignite The World':
Feeding More Than The Five Thousand (Prayer for Dorothy Day)
You never considered yourself a feminist. You were so tough it didn’t matter. Let Gloria Steinem collect the checks while you handed out bread and beefsteak, fish on Fridays and pancake feeds for the masses in dingy basements. That’s called work.
You loved art, literature of all stripes, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy more important than Bakunin and Goldman.
You tried to save your brother, so did I. I’m not sure how that turned out for you, my older brother Schizophrenic and abandoned in the Deep South. Maybe you just tried harder.
I want to try harder, to be giving and loving and unselfish. I’m learning, as you probably learned.
Place a rose behind my ear and call me ‘honey’, your ghost fingers soon to be canonized.
I’m selfishly
awaiting my chance to unselfishly hand out a loaf of bread.
/
Excerpt from 'Joan Of Arc Was a Murderer':
Flight
Screaming frantic and snot-faced and secret girl,
my body thrashing demon and all my aunts are terrified of this shaking beast, kicking and screaming but only tapping on denim knees with Spiderman slippers,
and was I ever an angel?
I wonder if I was ever graced with something as freeing as wings?
/
Excerpt from the unpublished work entitled 'Your Lips Are Like A Scarlet Thread' based on the freedom of sexuality in the Song of Solomon.
J.
All the red scrapes and green rot we’ve been through
disappear
as I pin your wrists to the headboard
and flex my hips strong and sure.
Your look of fear,
that blister of your childhood,
bursts as your moans shake my voice box,
vocalizing the bass thrums between my legs
and there is no violence anymore
as our grownup selves
kiss Heaven’s broken harp
and let ghosts die,
the huge death allowing us
not just to survive, but to thrive.
