My poem, “Lament on Mayuary” (modeled after John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”), is featured in the Kosmos journal July newsletter’s Summer Gallery of Poets (scroll to the bottom). Thank you to Kosmos Poetry Editor Carolyn Martin for selecting this piece!
Hypochondria Blues
What you’ve got is only a touch of neurosis,
so don’t get your knickers all bunched in a twist—
such worries can give you a deep vein thrombosis!
Do you think there’s a prize for a self-diagnosis?
Stop looking for lesions; don’t palpate that cyst!
What you’re dealing with here’s just a bit of neurosis…
That smartphone is gonna cause spinal stenosis!
The search engine’s warning that if you persist,
you’ll likely wind up with a deep vein thrombosis!
You’d have known it by now if you had halitosis—
like a boil, it’s not something easily missed.
Better face it, you’ve got a small case of neurosis…
Now, what would possess you to google psychosis?
Let me guess… The voices submitted a list?
Are they helping you summon a deep vein thrombosis?
It’s not a news flash you’ve got some type of –osis—
but the poking of badgers is what gets them pissed…
So give it a rest! Embrace your neurosis!
Who needs all the fuss of a deep vein thrombosis?
(Just to be on the safe side, look up pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis…)
“Hypochondria Blues” was published in the anthology, The Larger Geometry, by peaceCENTERbooks. Thank you to editor d ellis phelps for including my work in this beautiful and inspired collection!
The peaceCENTER, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in San Antonio, Texas, supports the learning of peace through prayer and education; and supports the demonstration of peace through nonviolent actions and community. All proceeds from the sale of this anthology go to benefit the peaceCENTER.
Cephalopod
I know how you tried to befuddle me
with that ten-legged head of yours—
how you thought you’d streak by
& ink me blind, but I see
how it is: I mean, once your penetrating-
obsidian eyes shone the ocean alive,
that cute little stunt of tucking back
your longest tentacles, as if you could
pass for being one of the girls, almost
like innocuous, trifling, bipedal me,
was glaringly obvious. I know your beak
was really poised from the start to strike—
to take my breath into your breath,
& crack open my sternum, & feast
on the still-thudding muscle inside me—
because motoring between my mere
two legs, primed to be torpedoed
with your mantle, until I tauten
like a caecum gorged on tiger prawns,
is the same jet-propulsion as yours
worked in reverse…
“Cephalopod” recently languished on a short list for an inordinate amount of time — poor guy — before ultimately being rejected, so I’ve just decided to share him!
THIS BEAUTIFUL POEM!!! 😍
My poem “Clandestine” is live in Issue 6 of Kissing Dynamite. I am grateful to the KD team for taking this piece.
I can’t begin to express how deeply soul-nurturing it is for me to collaborate with such an extraordinarily generous and brilliant man and poet as Robert Okaji!
Dead Rose at 5 Points Local
(A collaborative poem written with Stephanie L. Harper)
Having plucked the disheveled
petals from the core,
she waits
for the dead to speak
of last week’s sweetness—
of damp upholstery
and worn-out shoes,
of locked chests
and the faint honey
of unrealized hope.
Magnetized,
I twist the stem;
I quarter the seeds and
blemish the plate.
Which north rings true?
Which faded-red
bridge reveals the lost
inner compass?
Our ice cubes clink
no answers, as the essences
of hibiscus, lavender,
and mint slip over my tongue,
concealing the cool
tang of her demurring
ghosts…
But when she says whisper,
touching her lips
with an index finger,
I hear distant trains
baying like wolves,
and smell the char of nights
trailing the undiminished
river, its waters flowing
in every possible
direction, away.
* * *
“Dead Rose at 5 Points Local” first appeared in
View original post 16 more words
Our favorite poet, Robert Okaji, is truly at his finest in this “luminous” collection! Order his must-read chapbook today!
The publication date for I Have a Bird to Whistle (7 Palinodes) is February 25, and Luminous Press is currently offering copies for $7.50, shipping included, to U.S. addresses, through the 24th. Unfortunately, Luminous doesn’t ship internationally, but I will take care of those orders myself.
Order link for U.S. shipping addresses.
Contact me at aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com for orders to be shipped outside the U.S.
Twenty years ago
I received a birthday gift
from a close college buddy-slash-sometime lover
(What on earth were we thinking?).
Back then, our past was already in the past
& twenty-four was already not young.
He gave me a coffee mug
covered in chickens—
yes, painted chickens—
three plump specimens posed around the outside,
& one that looks like an index finger
with an eye, a comb, a beak, & a wattle,
slapped onto the bottom.
How, I can’t fathom,
but my friend knew that those chickens
with their orange-red, expressionistic bodies
would be a boat-floater for me—
the one time I had slept with him
had been an epic shipwreck,
with a silent drive to the airport in its wake;
on the way, we choked down pancakes,
& I stifled sobs in my coffee,
averting my eyes
from the helpless horror in his.
I then flew off into the wild, wide sky,
bewildered, drowning.
Somehow, for years to come,
his southern gentlemanly charms
still served to allure:
he kept his promise to write
& took pains to catalogue for me
the details of his worldly escapades
& various, accompanying sexual conquests,
always making sure to emphasize
the ways in which they were hot for him,
so as to prove those trysts’ relative rightness.
Then, years later, for my birthday,
came the unexplainably gratifying
chicken cup.
Still burning hot
& feathered in their chili-pepper red,
royal purple & verdant green cloaks,
my static & impossibly happy
aphrodisiac chickens
blush like lovers on a Grecian urn;
clucking, urgent.
My southern gent,
now so long ago flown from this callous coop,
wooed another & had his own brood,
as, in due course, did I,
but the mug, no worse for wear, remains
a spectacular feature—
like a bright birthday piñata
(with its promise of sweet reward)—
of my sacred morning ritual.
These chickens,
still ecstatically surprised,
letting out unabashed, open-beaked caterwauls,
adorn my most aged & prized coffee mug;
a vessel, perfectly-sized,
it cups its contents so adoringly,
fiercely,
like an egg enveloping its cache of gold,
as I take privileged sips.
The big chicken on the left
might actually be a rooster,
& that one on the bottom,
a middle finger.
“Painted Chickens” appears in my new chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament, scheduled for release in March 2019. If you like what you’ve seen so far, please take advantage of Main Street Rag Publishing Company’s fantastic pre-order sales offer of $6.50 per copy while it lasts, and feel great about your generous support of this enormously grateful poet!
Place your order HERE today!
Robert Okaji is the best collaborator in the universe — just so you know!
❤️❤️❤️
Stephanie L. Harper and I have individual poems and another collaboration inEpiphanies and Late Realizations of Love, aprint anthology of love poems, now available on Amazon.
My poem, “Salt,” (just scroll down) is live at the Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, the “love” issue, just in time for Valentine’s Day! Many thanks to editors Steve Gordon and Terri Lynn Cummings for sensitively engaging with and selecting this piece for publication.
“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” appears in my new chapbook forthcoming in March from Main Street Rag: The Death’s-Head’s Testament<<Available here for pre-order purchase for the fantastic price of $6.50/copy!
_____in my driveway:
Would you at least do me the courtesy
of an explanation?
What’s with your belly-mound-
cenotaph-arisen-from-the-stony-gloom
spiel? And why
this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose
of a napping cherub,
as if you didn’t believe
you were still reaching for the clouds?
_____I mean,
was your plump little belly’s
sky tribute supposed to un-stone the gloom
underfoot (as if
your heavenward-splayed
finger-knobs, all ruddy-bottomed
like a napping cherub,
never knew their very purpose
was reaching for the clouds)?
The spectacle of your tiny black
lids pressed shut in sudden,
brutal resignation to croaking
_____underfoot (even
consecrated by such skyward-clasping,
ruddy-bottomed branchlessness)
hardly passes for
transubstantiation… Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in
the spectacle of black-faced
brutality’s sudden,
penitent resignation to permanent blindness
for stealing a glimpse
of the sun? Besides, adaptive
hydrophobia á la iridescent feather-sheath
_____hardly passes for
transubstantiation… Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in
this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose
of a dead sun-god, as if iridescence
were designed expressly for
stealing a glimpse of the afterlife
in my driveway?
All right, buddy, just do me this one favor:
Spare me, would you?
“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” was first published in slightly different form in Underfoot Poetry. Thank you to editors Daniel Paul Marshall and Time Miller — both fabulous poets in their own right! — for selecting this piece.
SLHARPERPOETRY 