Love Poem
If My Heart Were an Acorn
I lie here on the warm pavement,
untethered from the oak,
Being gently tossed by
the wind. I roll
backward, the breeze catching in
my empty shell.
It propels me and sometimes it makes a whistling note,
too.
I’ve spent my time waiting—
Since I was released—for the
catalyst that would allow me to
grow, bloom, flourish.
I can feel it now! My liberator, its touch,
An embrace that can lead me into my golden age.
Ah, but empty pots don’t grow
So I greet the cold, damp ground with sorrow.
I’ll wait for a future that doesn’t want
me. That doesn’t remember I exist, nor care.
Swallowed by dirt, yet its sweetness
Disguises the mold trying to catch its footing
under my skin. I’m shrouded in darkness,
surrounded by frost, devoid of potential.
Being hollow makes it easier to crack, and
Being buried makes it easier to be lost. But
Being forgotten makes it easier to rot.
Self Portrait Poem
Color Matching
Somehow I’ve spent a whole week
Trying to figure out who I am. And
I’ve been living with myself for over twenty years, and
I’ve seen everyday my nose, feet, hands, and
I’ve heard my thoughts louder than anyone can, and
And yet I can’t seem to figure out who I am.
But identity crisis? No. That was so two years ago.
I’m just a bit incohesive.
I make myself inexcusably late (but excused by my chronic lateness),
Stuck deliberating between
My Pantone two eighty jeans or the two eight two blue
That might match a little better
With my one dollar belt, my eight year old coat, and my handmedown tee
So that people don’t see me
As a frumpy kid who’d be better off
If still dressed by her mom.
I don’t think it’s wrong to put in the effort without putting in the cash,
And besides, it’s not like I don’t have money to spend;
I just choose to treat myself
In moments shared by family and friends.
And before I leave, I glance in that silver coated glass.
Walk away. Return. Another quick glance.
A stranger looks at me
Through brown eyes, brown hair, brown
Skin, but really it’s more of a Pantone one sixty three.
I almost forgot I can’t be brown when there’s colorful people around.
The equatorial sun has kissed my blood
But European skies suck out all the fun.
Now my darkest shades come from
The spots on my face, my neck and back dotted,
But I’m the one who put them there.
Just like I’m the one responsible for the bits
That don’t rest nicely on my stomach or my hips.
I’ve peeled back that fleshy pink layer
To examine my mind. I am
A floating consciousness: black and white, cartoon-drawn,
Just a brain and a spinal cord encased in an
Invisible vessel. To the world I am not colorless,
But I wish it were blind to me.
Here, I have no shape or form; I’m either all in power
Or all entropic. But to be who I am, I have full control
Over behavior, traits, the things that make me a whole
Person. What to think. How to speak. Who to be.
My senses are intrinsic to me.
For all I know, you and I could have a different green
Where you, dear reader, see Pantone three six two
But I a three fourteen.
I create and build, crunch numbers ‘cause I can.
I’m proud to present as a woman in STEM.
Ideas bounce around my head, but no structure to my thought,
So how can I build bridges
When I can’t even build a sentence of prose?
Who knows? Maybe by the end of this
I’ll find there’s nothing I can do.
I’ve the EM spectrum in me, but you only see visible light.
My rainbow may be quenched, but
There’s more to seeing than sight.
I’ve spent the week trying to figure me out;
I just had to close my eyes.
Ekphrastic Poem
Questions for the Little Red Man in El Fin del Mundo:
Oh, little red man standing:
Why do you pose like so?
Beknownst to you, but you alone, the world may never know.
Are you the maker of el fin?
Do you triumph in the loss?
Do you celebrate your world as it descends into chaos?
My dear, querido, red man,
Are you the victim of this scene?
Your future left in shambles, your soul stuck in between
The living and the dead?
As the last man left alive,
What hope have you to carry on, grow old, persist, and thrive?
Señor Rojo may I ask you
About the ruins where you stand?
What brings you to Taq-e Kesra, in this foreign land,
A remnant of the past,
Forsaken by war?
Did conquest leave you desperate or are you conquistador?
Mister Red Man do you know
That your feet are stuck in ground
Of ceramic bits and broken souls with car paint all around?
The boulders that you climb on,
They beg for you to leap
Off wooden canvas into a world you see but cannot keep.
Place Poem
Setauket Harbor as a Non-Judgmental Benefactor
In March,
It rests forgotten. Abandoned, neglected, alone. You
used to visit It, befriended It once, but You’d
always leave and forget. Left It asking for You
to return. But You were two on-and-off lovers, except You
didn’t even know Its name.
In April,
You remember that You need to bend Your knees. It calls to You,
so this time You answer, walk to It. It listens as You
tell It Your woes. Anchor deployed.
In May,
You almost forget once again, but You
return. The sun is now warm enough for You
and It to soak it up, so You
do so together. The Adirondack chairs have come back and You
begin to look for new life.
In June,
You visit It many times. Shared salt water becomes Your
currency. It gives You wind when You
need Your thoughts blown away. You
embrace the dizzying nature of the place, with
maple leaves inducing a welcoming vertigo. You
let It speak to You when You can’t listen. You
feel It when It gives nothing for You to feel.
In July,
It attracts Others, but You don’t want to share Your
friend, Your caretaker. It is the beams that hold up
a house on the hill; those wooden supports can only belong
to one home. You asked It to build them under You.
Banter and smiles for the Others, but You
wish they would drown.
In August,
the sand burns Your toes and sun reddens Your
nose. Hot air begs Your lungs not to breathe.
Miniscule waves remind You that Your
ears still work. Minnows nibble on Your flesh and flies feast
on Your sweat. It’s what you need.
In September,
You wonder if You can still float. You
can’t feel Your arms or legs, but It
is a beacon for limbless buoys and people alike.
Each grain of sand worth the same as a
fiddler crab, dead heron, browning stalk, or You.
In October,
You visit It alone. No one else cares for Your
place. It’s Yours in rain and cold and warmth and light.
It’s Yours.
In November,
a chill tries to keep You away from It, but no force can keep You
apart. You no longer go in Its waters, but You
sit cross legged in Its mud.
In December,
cold air hurts Your lungs in the way that the heat used to. But You
still remember that You can’t live without each other, so You
Keep coming back. Ice lines the shore in a way
that no magic could produce. Fractals hold each granule of sand together.
Fractals hold You and It together.
In January,
pink sunsets could be the only reason You
would come back, except the sky doesn’t know what It
means to You. Even gray days and lightless nights
provide no barrier between You and It.
In February,
nothing happens. But You prepare Yourself to start anew with It.
Another cycle awaits, news months incoming. You
will walk on water in a few weeks. You will come to It
even when You don’t need it.
In March,
I come back again. I have new eyes, new body, new perspective.
I know It will never be forgotten again. It gave and I took, and I
don’t need It anymore, but I want It.
And It will forever welcome Me back.
Dramatic Monologue
Grievances by a Blue Liver from a Prosected Man
Everyone wants to know why I’m blue. What did I do? They’re asking if I killed him. They want to know what killed him. All I know is that he killed me when he went ahead and died. I don’t know why. All these peering eyes have brains behind them, so they should figure it out. Not me, I have no brain, just hepatic artery and hepatic portal vein. I make bile and I clean the blood. It’s what I know and what I’ve done. I helped him as best as I could and I did so without complaints. Every minute of every day. Maybe I could receive a thanks? Nope. All these hands holding me, poking at my lobes, can feel the strain that’s been put on me but they only care about why I’m blue.
They think it’s cool how I can regenerate (if the man I belonged to weren’t dead), but they only think about it when I’m warm, wet, and red. They talk about all these great things I do. All these corporeal functions unique to me. And did you know that I’m the largest organ in the human body? But I don’t care for one second about the fun facts that they have, because, while I was slaving away, turning blue by the day, they just assumed I was doing okay. I have no resentment in me for the man to whom I belonged. Without him, I wouldn’t have lived so long. And although I got zero breaks and was flooded at times by things I’d rather not divulge, at least I never had to be resected and grow back. Isn’t it ironic then, how he’s the one dissected? At least that’s what lets them look at me now, feel me. But they see me dejected and weary, and they can’t seem to remember what makes me so cool. They’re still just wondering why I’m blue!
No Prompt Assignment
Fuck I Need to Write a Poem
by Maya Peña-Lobel
Attention doesn’t belong to me
& I’m overdue on my loan
mmm I’m munching on my lip
& imperceptible thoughts won’t leave me alone
A passerby on a bridge pauses
& chucks a stranger’s phone into the stream
stream of consciousness interrupted
stagnant air occupied by that stranger’s scream
Another person, not far off,
will jump off an overpass just to know
what direction their limbs will point
when they go splat on the road
All the while I’m thinking of fowl
& what would happen if I kicked one
but drip, drip, drip of $15 fountain
feeds my mind with contradiction
Funny gaits & man buns
& vomit on my tongue
Charismatic chemist claiming
Youth is wasted on the young
Chicken squirted like a beam of pee
& this guy looks like he’d die on a boat
& I’m still picturing breastplate stones
while trying to make sense of what I wrote
Sestina
Climate Change Sestina
From the moment of his birth
he stumbles around blindly trying to measure his worth,
doomed by the past, but the earth has watched him grow;
She sees a weathered man but remembers the boy who caught snow
on his tongue. Where did that boy go?
His greed was written into fate at conception—seed planted into earth.
He is responsible for destroying the earth!
He cannot be separated from the systems that gave birth
to ideas like take-what’s-there-and-don’t-let-go,
making victors and victims from a fight not worth
starting. He sees his spoils before he sees that the snow
has stopped falling and the fields refuse to grow.
While the planet shrivels, sinister cycles continue to grow
that spew carbon into the air and pollute the earth,
acidifying oceans and melting glacial snow.
For the past four point five billion years since her birth
his planet has grown confident in knowing her worth,
so, assuredly, she will not go
without a fight. Species might go
extinct but she won’t die; when crops can’t grow
a few leaves will surmount all that he’s worth.
As a force to be reckoned with, she, Mother Earth,
will carry the dust of his ashes like the dust she gave for his birth.
A force powerful, but delicate like snow.
A message of pain is sent in every flake of snow.
But although burning, she cannot go
farther from the flame that watched her birth.
Instead, she wheezes as she breathes and shrinks as she grows.
To save herself, she throws fiery torment at him, the birds, the earth-
worms. She has no notion of who is worth
more. But in her wrath, she asks if she is worth
saving? She reminds him of his love for snow
and the beauty of life and the wonders of the earth.
She is his home since he has nowhere else to go.
From utility, she hopes their relationship will grow
into respect. But she is indiscriminate and unrelenting by birth.
The birth of civilization launched the demise of our Earth.
Ice ages come and go, but we have caused the rate of warming to grow
uncontrollably, threatening all that we’re worth. The time to act is now.
No Prompt Assignment #2
Two Pink Roses
my heart bulges, constricted by the vine;
two red drops spill
from the puncture wounds from the thorns of the
Two Pink Roses
that you grip onto tightly.
i can’t remember the last time it was this hard to breathe.
i can’t seem to figure out why i can’t see
anything but your broken form—
you’re in one piece before me, but shapes are torn
off every surface.
i can feel my limbs drooping into abstraction
even as my body tenses from
the air that i choke on. i fail
to hold my breath as you hold
Two Pink Roses
while you cross your heart, kneeling, head bowed, muttering into the empty space before you.
the sky is in tears, the sun is frowning,
the air is seizing from pain
but the clouds know how to make beautiful what once was
so it covers our skin in
delicate flakes that stick to our hair but melt into our heart.
and as you lift your head from prayer it begins
to dust the petals of the
Two Pink Roses
that you kiss ever so gently.
every moment starts as a seed and grows
into a bud or stays all stem
but no one knows what it will become
until it’s spent a while in the sun.
a lifetime of moments should be an overgrown field
of flowers, fungus, grasses, leaves.
so how can it possibly be
that She is the
Two Pink Roses
that you lightly toss?
i can count the days until it fades
but i just might want to hold onto the memory of the
Two Pink Roses
landing on Her new mahogany home.
i want to be there for you, do something for you
but with partner gone, you will be
your only companion
as you’re buried by the world, unable
to rise against the weight of it all, like the
Two Pink Roses
that will be buried by the earth while She ascends to the sky.
Talkback Poem
Please note: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a 1923 poem by Robert Frost, written in iambic tetrameter with a chain rhyme scheme of AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD. My talkback poem, "Staying in Woods on a Snowy Evening" (2022) is a parody of the Frost poem written with the same form in the voice of Chris McCandless. McCandless was an American adventurist who, inspired by 19th-century transcendentalism ideals, decided to live off the grid and ultimately died in the Alaskan wilderness. Multiple books and movies have been made since McCandless' death in 1992 about his life and experiences.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost - 1874-1963
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Staying in Woods on a Snowy Evening
Chris McCandless - 1968-1992
Whose woods these are I do not know.
But something begs for me to go
Past roads, through creeks, into the brush
To live amidst Alaskan snow.
But something begs for me to go
Past roads, through creeks, into the brush
To live amidst Alaskan snow.
I’ll sleep to roars of river’s rush
And wake from song by jay and thrush,
And even on a silent day
I will be joined by winter’s hush.
And wake from song by jay and thrush,
And even on a silent day
I will be joined by winter’s hush.
These woods are tempting me to stay,
And promises keep me away
From labor, greed, and vanity,
So from society I stray.
And promises keep me away
From labor, greed, and vanity,
So from society I stray.
Driven by insanity
I want to leave humanity;
I’ll stay to keep my sanity.
I’ll stay to keep my sanity.
I want to leave humanity;
I’ll stay to keep my sanity.
I’ll stay to keep my sanity.
Experiments in Time and Space
No Prompt Assignment #2
Micro—
The thing about micro
Is that you’re not supposed to
See without a —scope
Hear without a —phone
Be without a trillion —scopic cells making up your blood and bones.
Yet, somehow the micros don’t go unnoticed.
On the contrary,
Most only read about the macros in the news.
In obituaries.
We don’t always see them in front of our faces
Although the sad truth is that many do,
some more than other races.
We see, We be
Aggression. Aggressor. Aggressive.
And we permit, so we commit —aggressions.
I thought being here,
Immersed in this —cosm
of culture, of knowledge, of diversity
meant I wouldn’t see, wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t be
Witness or complicit.
Wrong.
It is delocalized:
Take the learned and the implied
from any and every where
And —wave it until KABOOM! it's in the air;
The perpetrator feeding off the perpetuated.
Labels need not be qualified
of religion, color, ability, sex
for we’re all the same when we are —aggressed.
And what the black says to the gay differs from
what woman says to the enby latine
But it all hurts in the same way.
And isn’t it ironic how
Only once the micros amass to macro
Is when we’re made to feel micro?
I once tried to —manage a situation
so that no one would feel left out.
But I failed. So they cried, having been tossed aside.
I cannot —manage the world.
Even if I tried.
And I’d be the wrong person to do so.
Yes, I can relate; I’ve been subject to hate,
But as far as the micro goes
I’m no better than the rest.
This —cosm of society
That I hoped would be ideal
Is not, I suspect, due to people like me.
So it becomes a breeding ground, as one might expect,
for —obes to grow
Until colonies can be seen by
the naked eye.
Maybe that’s the reason why
The micros don’t go unnoticed.
But the thing about micro
Is that you’re not supposed to
See without a —scope
Hear without a —phone
Be without a trillion —scopic cells making up your blood and bones.
Emblem Poem & Ars Poetica
i'd like to think that a zebra wrote this poem
Brushstrokes turned pixels
poems and prose to ones and ohs
sounds made by magnets
a swipe turns the page.
This, my friend, is the digital age.
Everyone wants to be special,
tries to be unique,
but if I’ve learned anything from memes
it’s that we’re all the same.
A different string of numbers follows each username
that logs on, seeing
no thought is new.
A distinct splash of ink, but I bleed into the rest of you.
And without any ink at all
I spin a piece of the web, infinitesimally small, or I simply get lost in it.
*****
A few months ago,
I wanted to disconnect, so
I went on a drive along the California coast.
I was squinting out of a dirty windshield
at elephant seals
to my right
at the edge of a blue void
while I sang along to the words of Pink Floyd.
And soon I noticed to my left there was
a different kind of sea:
Bovine eyes watched me
whiz past, taking turns a little too fast.
But I see cows everywhere:
Cows plowing through turnstiles in subways
Cows plodding through big superstores
Cows blocking the way on sidewalks
as they travel in herds on tours
Cows at sporting events
and school
on the streets
on plates filleted
in pastures
and now, next to the Pacific Coast Highway.
But before I had gotten far from the sea of cows
I almost crashed the car
doing a double take at a patch of zebras.
I don’t know why or how they were there
for I was in the middle of nowhere
halfway between San Jose and LA.
Had I not been going so fast I would’ve stopped
to look at the zebras
but alas, in mere seconds,
I passed them by.
Yet still, I remember those zebras
more than the cows, the ocean, the sky.
We’re not two lost souls in a fishbowl;
We’re eight billion cows on a hill.
So on a hillside of cows, who wouldn’t want to be a zebra?
*****
Lines stripe a page that will never get seen.
Black and white pixels dot the screen
but attentionspantooshort
for words and what they mean,
and besides, that point has been made before.