Moving Words 2009 Poems

The Last Time I Saw My Father

The last time I saw my father, he was on a bicycle. 
It was a week after he died.
It was raining.
I was walking on an empty road, next to a green field.
I stopped.
The field looked lush in the rain.
He bicycled up to me, and stopped, but he was looking down.
When he raised his head to look at me, his face was alight. 
There’s so much I want to see, he said.
He rode off.        

- Mark Tarallo
First published in Abbey, Issue #111, August 2007

Global Change

On the other side of the globe,
A bus travels to Kipili.
Arms, elbows, hips cramped together,
Those with seats guard them wearily.
Disparate voices on one theme: Obama.
Bits of weather, family too – all in Swahili
While the baby strapped to her mama
Watches wide-eyed, silent.

- Jenna Lawrence

On The Other Side Of The Poem

Amazing things appear.
A cat watches a yellow bird
Hang like a flower on a winter branch.
March breathes feverish hope
On the windowpane.
My mother stands in the doorway
Between dreams and hard, bare ground.
Do your homework now, she says.
Soon enough you’ll write what happens next
On the other side of the poem.

- Joyce Madelon Winslow

To Do List

Make coffee.  Sort socks.
Walk
around the universe
and back.
Pack picnic lunch
for your ghost.
Reshape the Moonlight Sonata.
As an afterthought--
eat fire.

- Kathi Wolfe
First published in Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, volume 4, number 4 (2003). By permission of Taylor & Francis. 

Dreadlocks

like barrels of cannons,
hidden below the deck
maybe even a mirage
or the wire of a violin, broken
and threaded against itself,
inaudible psalms
cocoon against skin

- Katy Richey

talking on the telephone to my mother

now that she’s eighty-eight
and suffers loss of short and long term
memory, I can tell her anything.

- Barbara Ann Porte