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CYLINDRICAL SEA
I washed your coffee cup this evening on Tuesday after work it waited appropriately on our coffee table a black heavy china inscrutable job, oval grip thoughtlessly blending an invitation to heft into shadow.
Cream and bean juice and sugar skinned over a sand colored pond on the bottom willing for new life to grow green, filmy arcs staining your steel spoon. My kitchen faucet’s surge swirled this morning’s mix to a foaming cylindrical sea, full of leftover life diluting puddlelike in April sloshed down the drain whose catch catches nothing from rain.
Rinsed of such inklings, dripping on our rack, waiting till tomorrow that cup denies my touch as a resisting toddler gripes so smooth a skin needs no scrubbing by rough hands.
I dry ten fingers. A sunrise drop at your train, a peck of a kiss goodbye cools on my cheek as I grip the wheel beginning Wednesday.
Geoff Kubilus printer, formalist poet, dramatic performance poet |
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THE GRIST MILL
It is November I am in the park facing the colonial grist mill that Papa loved The sun hangs boldly in the hard blue sky
Papa’s dead, Mama’s dead Some gold still stubbornly hangs on to the trees as they expose their twisted bark to the prying eye of the sun But most of the autumn glorious color is over
I passively watch as seagulls snatch, steal and hunker down huge globs of bread through their gullets While geese honk rhythmically following in flocks, Marathon eating as they ready themselves for their long trek south
I remember other autumns younger autumns when I stood right here with my father feeding the bread when I stood right here with my daughter feeding the bread The golden memory still stubbornly hangs on to my exposed twisted bark as I ready myself for the long trek south
Shannah Levi
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Performance Poets Association® |
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ATOM
Someday they’ll find me as a little wire ball my limbs extended thin as one breadth of thread wrapped tightly as grudged round a teensy germlike nucleus
pinballing curb to granite curb down my favorite hill off the sharp right turn from our busy street where my parents’ house burned while I trampled neighbors’ yellow lawns chasing swallowtails, verging on ejaculation and fear of fire.
An unround youngster still, a metal marble made of rusting coils scooting riskily downhill on pitted asphalt, my central seed dense and gravely hankering to dent or bust those coils from within on any given bounce down a fathomless smokey street
I go on riding quiet inside, offering grim gravity through occasional nudges from the heart, an atomlike emotion sporting flameproof shells of wire. Galvanized electron orbits seal out curbside sand abd withered condoms and God knows what trash abandoned in my gutter.
Someday I’ll hit bottom and split, or be crushed by a passing truck, or snuff the match and unwind.
Geoff Kubilus |
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POLITICS
A rickety bedroom set of 1940s vintage lodges in my mother’s house in shambles Scared, and broken blonde wood dresser drawers speak of a young woman dreaming of finer things but settling for bargain basement because her older sister knows someone in the wholesale furniture business So she obediently buys from Sol Sylvia’s very good political friend Sol gets a sale and owes Sylvia some favor to be paid at a later date Sylvia gets to be a big sister, mover and shaker, who always know how to get things done And my mother gets a bedroom set that she will hate for the next 60 years
Shannah Levi poetry therapy group facilitator, co-founder of The Live Poets Society, TV cable show co-host, publishing credits |