Poems

Don’t mention my divorce or deferred adolescence but apologize
for the times I was a lousy parent.

I am | the Other Side of the story, the face | from a picture book | whose title | you cannot | pronounce: | In another life | I forged with you across continents,

You were special, hard… but so are gems. You were a shard of glass embedded under my skin.

A decade and two years of prairie farming. His hands touching her limp silhouette; Laid in the comfort of her bed.

Bodies – One by One – which flail out the Rivers like Salmon, already caught by haunting Men.

Only an expanding heart . . . one that under-stands Those who ignore their history are doomed to repeat it.

A thousand ideas bouncing and bounding inside my head, knocking the smoke out of me, drumming up plans for the day after…

The numbing aftershocks as four farm families buried sons in closed caskets, automobile rubble robbing her last chance…

The smoke doesn’t choke me anymore. I took the hell you made for me and made it home…