mx

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Remember the 20-year poem? Here’s its 30-year-old brother.

Posted in New Free Verse | 2 Comments

dawn

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

For a feeling
that breaks into blossom
where dreams seed

there are no adequate words

but there are colors
that tell it

and those I would paint
over sunrise, backlit

if I had the right brush

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

readying

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

garden pic

I am no lady, weeding
deep as soil goes, elbows in
and eager to seed,

stopping to wave at my neighbor
who says my kneeling
is more a predictor of spring
than inconsistent robins,
but she’s not a dirt person,
forgets her own clay
and the garden we were cast out of
with a shudder,

but I remember.
I am all earth, grounded
and down to it;

shameless murderer
of dandelion exuberance,
welcome everywhere else
but here, where I want tomatoes

and that’s the key
to growing–knowing what to plant
and what to pull up
no matter how deep
the root.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Jackalope Tastes Like Lobster

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Jackalope
tastes a lot like lobster
hard headed
mythic

conceived in thunder
and born in hail

though it is difficult to chew
with a tongue in your cheek

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , | 23 Comments

Some Other Jesus

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

The Jesus I know
fed 10,000 hungry, touched lepers,
blessed tax collectors
and turned tables in the temple
upside-down, because they were heavy
with coins.

The Jesus I know
let a woman sit at his feet
and learn, instead of cooking dinner;
allowed a whore
to wash his feet with oil

dry them with her hair,
and before Gethsemane called it
not a gift for the poor
but a funeral offering.

The one you worship,
the one who hates fags,
loves guns, wrote the constitution,
and puts women in the place
you want them to be
must be some other Jesus
than mine,

because mine is the one
who lifted someone else up and said
let the one who is sinless
cast the first stone.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , | 29 Comments

proportionality

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

There’s a right ratio
for happiness, tabulated
in a series of checkboxes, plus/minus
a tally of smiles.

My recipe is less complex:

a meeting of heat and sweet,
cider vinegar and salt
that dances chipotle jelly across the palate
in a palette of everything
the tongue can paint

and, tasting that bliss

I will not count anything
but clouds, or maybe stars,
settled tight against the belly
of the hill I’m sitting on.

That’s the math
of happy.

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , , , | 37 Comments

the antonym of corn

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Susan L Daniels

Corn bread’s in the oven
and yes I ground the seed myself,
absent of nuance
because what’s mundane feeds
and if this is my mask, it was not made
but found; ring-bound features freed
by flint, the way my kin carved spirit masks
from living wood, not cut from the tree
until fully shaped.
The art and the worship of it
was seeing the healing beneath bark
and breaking it out.

If my voice is dark
if my voice is menstrual
remember there is power inside blood
which is why the orthodox won’t taste it
even as it feeds nightmares, and

if I name goddesses
I remember gods too, and that moon
is not so much female as she is awe–
that trapped asteroid
is the closest most get to what’s bigger;
some of us have stood there, hungry
on the surface of that tide-pulling
can’t-nourish-anything stone.

 

***Victoria is asking us at dVerse to write about our voices, which is something I did here, originally back in January.   Can’t wait to see what the rest of you come up with!

Posted in New Free Verse | Tagged , | 52 Comments