b: a Poet @bapoet - Tumblr Blog

#b poetry #summer poetry #love poems #blackberry bramble #original writing #spilled ink #original work #bpoetry

The little birds swoop and swoon from the trees, snapping their wings--

gaudy as drag queens fanning their cleavage--

flirting with the ground, with gravity, and today could be easy if we let it. We could be more answer, less asking. Everything could be dappled and slow-moving as the word home. Let me be the creek where you stood knee-deep in childhood. Pile rocks in my mouth. Immerse yourself in me-- I mean I want to be kept. I mean, let this be worth keeping.

#spilled ink #b poetry #summer poems #poetry #original writing

When the stars are a million hungry mouths

chewing through the woolen sky

and your heart, that wicked beast,

is an amateur aerialist doing barrel rolls

in the stretched-thin canvas tent

of your ribs, I hope you remember

the nights I wore your naked body

like a weighted blanket, when your sweat

was the only thing pinning me against

the gravity of your spinning moonrock bed.

#spilled ink #love poems #for the missing

The summer I was meat-- I mean messy-- I mean, something to take down the swelling-- the summer I was hands. Hands

only, searching for a body, anybody, clawing as if I could claim, could crawl inside and live in peace like a parasite-- I mean-- have something that was mine. Let’s try this again. What I’m trying to say is-- there are days I am more meat than body. Shambling bundle of electricity and need-- I mean-- Maybe there are days I’m so throat split-- I’m a choked well of wishes, or a rock whistling into a tied dogs ribs or the steel in that boot tip. Can you collect me like beekeepers collect honey? Take me back to your backyard hammock where we napped with my head on your chest. I was there, I saw it-- the light kissed your eyelids like spring was falling in love. Your cup was so full, but you didn’t spill a single drop.

Modern Day Mercy Brown Addresses Her Brother Edwin

These days, we’ve done away

with the graveside burning,

the unpalatable ash heap mixed

with spring water. You probably

won’t need the mortar. That pestle.

Sorry, we just don’t have time

for ritual. Though, of course,

the process for removal’s

stayed pretty much the same—

crank open the ribs, dig

my fistful of muscle

from the marble slab

of this chest. Listen,

Don’t get squeamish,

you little prick. Just toss

the clotted mess

into the food processor

and press pulse. Go ahead,

gulp down the mangled pulp.

Go ahead, reclaim the life

I stole. Call me vampire to sate

your thirst, brother. Thanks to me,

you’ll live forever.

You were important because you weren’t. A wildfire with evacuation orders

forty miles north-- not close enough to fear the burn, though I take stock

of my belongings and pack a box for sentimental reasons.

You were not the storm, let alone its eye, and were I to find

some elusive and life-altering truth, it would be despite you.

You were not the train. I was not lashed to the tracks to patiently

await the savior you could never be. There was no

dramatic ending, no cut scene of me racing through the airport terminal.

Imagine: girl ducks security, clutching carving knife, rends open chest to present this feebly flapping fistful of arteries to her aghast beloved.

What then? Do you stow this macabre cliche away in your carry-on so it can bleed on your toiletries, seep stains into your clean underthings?

No, you were important because, like the stubborn black fly beating itself senseless against my window pane, setting you free

was a simple act of opening-- easy as the sigh of relief I breathe while watching you leave.

-brenda taulbee

#b honest #b poetry #unlove poems #spilled ink

On the candied island

of her bed, after braving

the wet sweat lagoon

of our two bellies,

as the salt

of our athletic

love making clings

to our limbs, we

relive childhood

playfulness—

she

cracks a fist

of egg over my head,

yolky fingers tracing

trails of slime through

my hairline. I

deprive her wrist

of pulse until the spider

spins her invisible web.

When my fingers pluck

the blood-

-lessness from her

pale palm, she lets

me believe

I’ve done it correctly,

though my grip

leaves her wrist

aching for days. Oh

Kookaburra, are you

still waiting for me? In

that old gum drop tree

my mother sung to reality

night after night, we

were able

to share something

and it was sweet. Oh,

laugh.

Kookaburra laugh.

Kookaburra

save some

for me.

#spilled ink #b poetry #poetry #childhood games #sex

btpboom

The Boy in 15D

falls in line with the other Marines, these brothers in name if not yet deed, these fresh-faced recruits with sweat prisming in the pithy bristle of their new buzz cuts. When he leans forward to tell the boy in 14C about his girlfriend’s inner thighs, his baby fat belly— that roll, where his years-ago mother would bury her face— folds over the waistband of his best blue jeans. He is bragging about last night. How his girlfriend met him in the hotel parking lot and in the front seat of her car, parted her pretty legs. He forgets to say that afterwards she cradled his head while he wept. The boys are all oorah and bravado. They talk rifles and training, women and hazing, trying on the language of country like an ill-fitting uniform, convinced it is something they will grow into. As they drift, one by one to sleep, their necks craned at impossible angles, their breath wetly whistles the tunes their mothers first fell in love to.

bapoet

—brenda taulbee

Ode to the Old Black Dog -for Layla Summertime and Portland and the sun like a child refusing to set, smearing insolent color across the horizon. We walk, hand in hand behind the bow-legged strut of her dog’s failing hips. A pendulous barrel of knobby ribs awkwardly leading the way. Some day, Jen starts, and I wait. Some day she will be a senile old lady. We both hold our breath as she missteps, one paw knuckling into a stumble. She recovers miraculously to stagger on without a thought for our anxiety. My girlfriend’s twelve-years-young puppy. I am amazed how memory colors our perceived reality– it’s pollution that makes this sunset impossibly pink. All the rosy, lingering particles of life suspended invisibly before our eyes.

This Is A Goddamn Poem

What does it mean to have a mouth

like a knife fight? How do we reconcile killing our darlings?

Bear witness to the burning. The everywhere burning. The mountains and canyons, the valleys, all burning. Burning, the land where your childhood raged and rioted, the hills where you galloped free, burning, the gulley where you found the doe, gut shot and bleeding beneath the stand of trees where your father once carried the great weight of his favorite dog's body in a rustling garbage sack. That old black dog so full of stomp and stamp before curling into each fireside nap. He is resting now, under a blanket of ash. Your home, it is burning, and your heart, yes, even that delicate, industrious machine inside your chest is full of misfires. And still the world turns. The moon grows full, as she is wont to do. The smoke cradles her heavy belly, as she dreams, drowsy with embers.

#spilled ink #b poetry

A Spell Against Missing

Listen, I am building a shrine. Yes, a shrine to the silver in your hair. To the snarls and strands that I gathered each morning of summer, gathered with my fingers and threw, casually, away knowing there would be more to take their place– On your pillow. Coiled in the bathroom sink. Littering the kitchen floor. Listen. I am building, clumsily, this shrine. I am building a shrine to each worry, each grief, to each silver lining. To every thing you keep losing. To everything I have found.

#spilled ink #b poetry

Your mother is tired of losing her hair. In the kitchen

she practices casual alchemy, blends one egg, warm water,

to the consistency of yogurt adds one scoop henna, silky,

silted as riverbed dirt. Your mother contorts over the

kitchen sink, rinsing and rinsing. You once told me she

always drinks a cup of water after sugary treats so

the sweet has nowhere to stick. Your mother, pre-diabetic, is tired

of losing her hair. She is tired of losing, she is tired. Yesterday,

sitting in the sun she taught me to say “run” to say “flying”

to say “dancing” and she asked me, in return, to gift her with

the English words for dying.

#spilled ink #b poetry #poetry #mother tongue

While the rice burbles peacefully on its back burner

and your mother hacks vegetables into manageable bits

you plant my hand in an epsom bath until the flesh

becomes pliable, the splinters almost affable under

your attentive gaze, normally reserved for furry, four-legged patients.

And I too feel somehow animal. Under your touch, so much tenderness.

You wince as you dig just below my skin's surface, dig with the tweezer’s tip, searching

for something to grasp onto, pulling insistently at everything

foreign and painful. Restoring myself to me.

#b poetry

You once showed me how to fish the oyster out of a roast bird, to dig with my fingertips for the prized wedge of meat situated between wing and thigh. How was I to know your appetite for tenderness was one greedy bite?

#spilled ink

Now, scientists say each memory is a reconstruction. Yes, every time. My fondest lie: you lying beside me in that hotel room.

Once I made a girl fall in love with the idea of you.

Once she loved me too, because of the green lace of your panties against white sheets, the zipper

of your patient spine like a sunrise biding its time beneath horizon, I mean beneath white

sheets and sheets of clouds— I mean, how you undid me, dear. That summer. You and I everywhere

searching for a way home.

#spilled ink #throwback #memory

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

b: a Poet