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Author: JS

Sustainable

When our office switched from recyclable
cups to sustainable mugs my boss

said she never pours tea into coffee
mugs because coffee was a thoughtless

guest who never, really, leaves, like
there’s always one sock left under

the couch to be found six months later.
I shrugged because I’d never found so

much as a quarter beneath the cushions.

Jesus, too, warned against pouring new
wine into old wine skins lest they burst

and stain the carpet but my coffee
mug has never

yet

cracked.

Terraform

In the water park they gather
beneath its tilting lip,
their bodies sway with waves

held high in the cauldron perched above
their heads, swinging further deeper drip by drip
until gravity overtakes anxiety

falls, crashes against hunched shoulders
or upturned faces and just misses the feet
of the boy afraid of.

But in the future he crafts a future
from the backseat after school
knowing someday our feetprints will shape

the face of Mars which takes
a lot of water and a lot of air
that someone will have to carry

in maybe a big bucket like at the park
carried by bigger rockets but the air
might escape so the bucket will need a lid.

An Ounce of Pretension

There are few opening lines more pretentious than
‘I have a hot tub’—maybe ‘I don’t own a TV’ or

‘I read The Economist’—but it’s true and anyway
it’s for my wife’s fibromyalgia and it was on sale

and there’s no other way to explain the leaves that
become trapped and float unnoticed to the surface

sink beneath the jets lost in the flotsom to wind
between our toes and lay at the bottom of this

chemical bath dying as we relax color fading like
an astronaut without oxygen who can’t keep her

eyes open as the warnings flash 15 10 5 3 percent
red through her eyelids but she’s long since succumbed

to an isolated slumber and slipped down to death to
wind between God’s toes, a leaf in the filter but

he still knows her name.

Three Counts

I cannot draw
but I did
my best to gild
the functional canvas of
his
field-trip lunch sacks
with apple trees and
iron gates and
atoms and books.

(It was the only way
I could be
there and anyway
PB&J
is boring enough.)

The truth wasn’t,
though.
Needed neither apples nor atoms
to make it
any more
there
but we can’t help
ourselves with
such scintillating sin.

(We save our
sharpest
crayons for the
cleanest
lines of our
deepest
fears.)

Still
I wanted to draw
that Sunday,
as someone stood
in your stead,
the way you were:
hands raised in blessing
bouncing on your feet
so willing to
love
us and me and them and
him
as God so
loved
the world
with, surely, angels
at your side and behind
and around.

But I could only
see a darkness
billow from
organ pipes
to claim your shadow,
sneak from
under choir robes
wrap your wrists
(again)
in chains and
the laughter couldn’t’ve
been yours because you
were screaming
as its claws sunk beneath
your soul.

So instead
I wept
because I have such trouble
drawing hands.

Published in Strange City Digest, Winter/Spring 2021.

Urgent Message When Flashing

It’s power, of a kind, to draw
the attention

ACCIDENT EXIT 93 EXPECT DELAYS

of zombied motorists with a
silent,
amber scream

FLOODING HWY 2 ALT RTE CR KK

to warn of jackknives, pileups, sinkholes,
(perhaps) transdimentional hordes

COFFEE ON CAR ROOF FULL DARK ROAST HELP

on southbound I-85.

As the boundaries of traffic form and
fade within
roving, elongated

GLORIOUS DETOUR RTE 17 EXIT 12

search lights
how bleary and half-dozed must seem

DO NOT IGNORE CHECK ENGN LIGHT ASK UNCLE JACK

the line of urgency at 3:27 AM.

How stippled, how cracked.

DID YOU HEAR THAT

Published in Giant Robot Poems, Vol 1.

Crazy Cat Lady

I cradled him, fresh from a morning
surveying his kingdom, into my face;

smelled winter beneath his fur,
flowerbeds behind his collar.

Wondered at those who collect these
haughty envoys, risking the ire

of municipal codes and threadbare
trope of crippling loneliness

to surround themselves with smells of
life, now, beyond their grasp.

My Life As an Adverb

in the beginning was the Word;
it has/will been/be, ever since/more.

some (words) are more
import-
signific-
relev-
ant than others, without
which the story is lost or
meaning less.

some ARE, some DO,
while some ARE/DO both while
never break-
ing
stride.

the others, though,
gild and embellish
are clutter and noise,
momentary-
ily
worthy of a roughshod draft;
unworthy, certain-
ly,
of eternity.

do they know if they
ARE or DO or do they
wait, anxious-
ly,
for the sharp, red pen?

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