A plethora of poetry!

Since I forgot to post the past few days, you all get four poems today! Neat huh?

My Husband Is a Sniper

And the fat kid likes cake.
We live in the sewer stewing over
melted flesh and our right
to pursue death.

My husband is a sniper
and he waits in the trees
for me to come home
before he fires.

Something went wrong in the desert
and he doesn’t know
whether he pulled the trigger
or not.

And all the men
slip into their corners
to be alive in nightmares
and not remember.

Pike felt blood on his hands
in the right light.
-Amy Solomon-Minarchi


My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up The Task

A basket of apples brown in our kitchen,
their warm scent is the scent of ripening,

and my sister, entering the room quietly,
takes a seat at the table, takes up the task

of peeling slowly away the blemished skins,
even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully.

She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh.
For this, I am grateful. I explain, this elegy

would love to save everything. She smiles at me,
and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills,

domed with thin slices she brushes into
the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove.

What can I do? I ask finally. Nothing,
she says, let me finish this one thing alone.
-Jon Pineda

Same Old

The same old story is different with each
re-telling. What did mother say? One
of the sisters asserts her truth to the other's
incredulity--someone has to be right.
Was the forest dark or light? Chiaroscuro
doesn't count. It's not logic but will,
the will to win. The trail in Mohican Park
leads to Lyons' Cave, deep and murky
with its rocky brow above the spring
you can drink from, or could. And the dark rot
of leaves under the oaks sprouts morels
you can fry, spongy smoke on the tongue.

You can't make people get along.
Are the sisters speaking? One sulks
outside. The other begins again,
the audience all her own. Branches
break their fall, and the few grasses
are shriveled. Why enter the forest at all?
The arrowheads have been harvested,
and all the bones filed into needles.
-Mary Crow; Colorado Poet Laureate


What It Was Like Those Days

Since, as a child, I was happy
as a child, I thought every one
was happy, including the grimy man
who lived at the city dump in a shack
decorated with hubcaps, broken chairs
by the door cheerfully facing out to a waste,
those days, of rubble smoking and oily dirt,
although it was a strange kind of happiness
I knew I wouldn’t ever know.
Even the dead, I thought then,
grinning as I biked around town,
were happy in their own way.
That’s what it was like.
-Robert King
(by permission Northwest Review)