“‘S’cuse me ma’am. I’m lost.
I can’t find grandpa nowhere.”
“Funeral room five.”
Categories
Tag: life and death
Categories
Shrimp: Roach of the Sea
What’s lost is mine now.
Now somehow you want it back.
Gotta catch me first.
Categories
Oopsie Daisy
Coffee, pen, journal
I told the page a secret
Blotting out the sin
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Water Has Been Found
Ridges cleave open
Sun screens burn to smithereens
Mars? Arizona!
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Lost Streak
Pond swells after rain
Cactus bitter at it all
Progress down the drain
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Don’t Answer
The moment he calls
I want to be by his side
Like how a leash works…
If love is a hotel…
And my love is on the top floor…
What gets me in the door?
To the front desk?
On the elevator?
With a key to the top floor? (Of course that floor is locked and guarded by fearsome goons.)
To the same room on the top floor?
And into his arms to save his life?
Categories
Alone In My Mind
With clanging whirlwinds
Still meditating—no breath—
My own voice unheard
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Lake Michigan Winter Date
Crystal ice like shells
Once we fall through, won’t we freeze?
Scurry back laughing
Categories
The Starting Over
I stir the cream into my coffee. The sky is lit with the moon and it keeps me awake enough to race with my thoughts. “Compatible,” I think. I keep getting hit with this word when I least want to hear it. When I make a play for permanence, the other party starts their doubts. “Is it me or her timing?” “Is she consistent?” “Is she looking at me right now?” I don’t want to make them uncomfortable, but I do. And then they hit me with it. “Do you think we’re compatible?” And the next move is crucial. Because once they ask, there is only one correct answer.
Categories
In-Patients
Knock, hinges, then light
Gentle, cold touch as bill mounts
“like to go home please…”
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Brings Him Glory
I couldn’t think of something more peaceful to do than sit on the grass in the sunlight and let my warmth and the temperature of the grass come to one stable level. It is even more than touching snow until fingers freeze just slightly. Like flow. The beautiful mornings are given to us by God and the perfect temperature is something set by the Lord. Even when we assume details that please us are too trivial for the Lord, remember that he made it so grass shows up as individual blades instead of one large patch of a waving piece of oxygenated plant. He detailed it so that grass is singular. So I must see the small pleasures as singular—a detail given to me, once again, by our true and living God. Because he is living he can also enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Whenever I feel warm I imagine that the atmosphere is giving me a hug, keeping me close and safe and comforted like a child. When it is cold I want to cry. And then both are love and beauty and detail from God and in all he is righteous.
Categories
Love Then Lost
All the while we snooze
Sorrow billows, tears…. pillows
‘Tis better to have…
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Junior Joseph
Mother from Ukraine
Father from proud land Haiti
Fight and cold always
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A Vow, Maintained
She told her father
But he couldn’t disannul.
Head hung, she went on.
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Precocious Indeed
“This isn’t too hard.”
Then she fell hard off the bike.
“And life moves on still!”
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God’s Mercy
If I had to choose,
Criticism than lashings.
Lashings than to die.
Categories
The First Kill
Didn’t feel as dirty as I wanted it to. Just hunting the deer and understanding the death of the animal… I later on smell metal as I feel the air coming through the grill in the truck. The doe sprawled across the front of my truck is the bloodiest part of my life. All else is peaceful and full of life. The only death is what I hunt.
“Good morning,
I hope this email finds you well. You must understand I feel the obligation to report anything out of the ordinary. There’s a young girl who expends a great deal of energy trying to go unnoticed. She moved into the building, maybe it’s been a year and a half, and probably would have gone just so—unnoticed, that is—if it hadn’t been my job to take notice of her. But then on Thursday I noticed she got out of an F150 around 4p and this time a young guy was with her. Not the type I think she’s usually with, but he got out with her.
Now, what happened next is just my biased interpretation of what I remember and I am sure you’ll have more than a few people call you about this, but I do not have time to double-back so I have to send this to you while I can still remember detail. So please do as my wise aunt says and “take the meat and throw away the bones.”
My memory is cloudy as it all happened so fast and emotion caught me by surprise being at home. Also this girl is how my daughter (one day) will be after I can teach her how to notice things. Anyway the girl and the young guy approached a car on foot from about 40 yards away. The girl knocked on the window, crouching down to the driver within at eye-level. The engine started running then. The guy moves the girl away and stands in her place. Eye-level. He motions for the window to come down.
No movement and the engine was still running. The guy handed her something, she started to puncture the tires one at a time and the guy stood at eye-level to the driver the entire time. Engine off after the third tire. The only tire untouched being the driver front tire. The girl hands the tool back to him and the person we’ve all been waiting for steps out of the car.
“Open it!”
The young man must have been as tired and angry as he looked because he couldn’t deal with the dialogue. And do you know… even now, as I write this… and every time I think it over I am more and more sure that young man is exactly the man I think he is.
In that trunk—they made the driver open it up—was a dog in painful condition. She had to carry the dog out of the trunk and brought to health from there, but it took all night. Luckily the vet is a mile and a half away, but it shouldn’t be this way.
Anyway the young guy looked like he wanted to carry that girl. The same way she needed to carry the dog. I just couldn’t believe any of it. The world is so strange. I’m exhausted now that I’ve written it all. If you need corroboration, Sam saw it too so I cc’d them. Be safe and keep the neighborhood safe.
– Torrence Oberlin Jr.”
Out of the tumbling of earth,
The fall
Has become me
And swallowed what was once stumble.
Loam
Pearson Pivot 