Poem in Your Pocket Day

Consider this my pocket. Consider yourselves (as I honestly think of you) as my friends and family. Consider me sharing one of my favorites.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond 

by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Perpetually Late Girl

Jumping on the bandwagon at the end of the ride is typical of me. I am usually the last to know, but I will not let that deter me from taking the opportunity to compose a poem in honor of April: National Poets and Writers Month.


Many celebrated with a "Poem a Day Challenge" and I got wind of this on Tuesday. I might have to do some catching up!

Taken from Robert Lee Brewer's blog Poetic Asides:
" For today's prompt, write an end of the line poem. Maybe the narrator of your poem is at the end of his or her line. Other possible lines that have an end: assembly lines, phone lines, power lines, rail lines, graph lines, dotted lines, waiting lines, lines of poetry, etc. "

Flight

His idle eyes cast

about the points

of the people’s heads

as they were lead

down the terminal lane

of this coordinate plane.

No slope could plot

what his mind forgot

as he put heel before

toe, at last

this row,

his spot. 

We Stutter

we stutter at opportunity
we suck, hiss, we kiss our teeth
we are angst burrowed beneath
the we of tomorrow and
the we of the past

we did not last

we bark at the bark
of filmy trees
we heed and grant
access to pregnant
circumstance

we did not advance

we fear the oak and
the seed that smoked
and bred sprouts
that lived dead,
that died

we did not survive

we grew great
we separate
we permeate
the two lines
of the parallel
equal sign

we did not agree

we accessorize resilient beauty
we terrorize even
our scalps
because perhaps
we dream not to fly
but to be fly

we did not soar

we bore a torch
we ignored the source
we are one force
inert and stable
giants unable
to bend

we pretend

we stutter at opportunity
we blink at unwavering eyes
we look at the sky as
though there is glass
yet we passed
through

The Crash

On the way home from summer camp, a cigarette butt rolled past a rugged tire to the white stripe on the road, conceding to the whims of the wind, not touching anything. I allowed myself a blink and caught his image as my eyelid shuttered up, crouched low on his sleek Harley Davidson. My head banked right in awe, stirred by the weathered arms sculpted to the handlebars. The stingy air conditioning strained to meet me here in the third row of the Mays’ minivan; I fanned it closer, propped up the window, and bit my lip. The big bit of machine throbbed between his legs, hummed low in the lane next to us. I fell upon lust at a busy intersection with a dirty looking redneck on a motorcycle. Twenty seconds later I had already planned a wedding reception. Implausible. There isn’t enough time at a stoplight, I mused.

My eyes drifted back to the cigarette butt and it fluttered under the influence of a sedan’s muffler. With the sudden combination of screams, horns, and crunching aluminum, the burnt stub snuffed out the connubial air. Two lanes away, a semi turning west on Okeechobee Boulevard forgot to propel the trailer sufficiently. The torpor and acceleration fought then swung the cargo too far into the proximal lane and before my eyes a domino effect condemned all of the forward pressing drivers.

I worried for the man on the Harley. As cars scrunched like unnecessary paper into each other, zigzagging over the asphalt, his turn was only seconds away. My voice reached him before the velocity did. “Get on this side!” I waved my arms in desperation. “Hurry! Move to this side of the van!” His head flashed around and his engine revved and he weaved through to the island. The green Toyota, whose muffler had tousled the filter-tip, inched closer and closer to my window. I saw the panicked look of a woman as she screamed and drifted involuntarily into the door next to me. Finally sensing my own danger, I unbuckled myself, sliding to my left in one swift motion. The fear was bigger than the impact. We were two lanes from the truck and the tail had no more acceleration. The van tipped. Mrs. Mays and the girls all screamed. And with a thud, I knew we were safe.

The breath that was trapped in my throat coughed itself free. Our shock went ahead, passing out concerned “Are you ok?” checks and sighs of relief. I looked around – for him. He was standing, one foot in front of the other, his palms pressed up on the van, heaving air. He looked up for me, then at me, and the purity in his eyes made me understand. Once upright and relieved, he pulled his lips against his teeth, not a smile really, and he nodded. I mouthed my thanks to his back, knowing that he deserved much more.

story by Maxie Steer, all rights reserved

Wal-Mart Showdown

Thank you for joining me for my first time...

First blog post.

First story in newsprint.

First story about Wal-Mart.

...It will not be the last! Check back every Thursday for updates.

 Wal-Mart Showdown
A toddler’s frantic wail was upended when the cashier exclaimed “Oh, uh-uh” in that manner only a disapproving black woman could. At once, everyone in the vicinity of lane twenty-nine turned their attention to the screaming child bobbing on his mother’s left hip. Her stringy blonde hair jerked with her useless bounce and then swung as she moved her groceries from bagging spindle to trolley. Tiny gasps like a breathing accordion went down the line. The murmurs rose when the little boy’s screams resumed. He pointed his ruddy little fingers at a plastic bag being transferred in his mother’s hand. He had been screaming throughout the entire checkout process but now it was gossip-worthy. His tiny fists paraded across his mom’s face, over her chest, and she merely grabbed at his flying fury. No reprimand.

It went on like that, unbridled childhood ego dominating adult logic and pride. The onlookers had varying expressions of disgust, understanding, and apathy. The sigh from the high-chested woman pronouncing the total was loaded with rough disdain. Her impatient face suggested that she had spanked the child at least twice in her mind already; that by now he’d be calling her “Ma’am”, sitting scolded on the crook of her jutted hip. As she printed the receipt, the blonde woman reached across the counter to grab it with steely gray eyes and set jaw, ready to force the plump, overly judgmental woman out of her business. Despite her hastened retreat, the bawling corralled the pair to the nearest exit.

The child’s screams got louder, powerful enough to silence the conversations around them. The front wheels of the shopping cart had almost breached the Walmart greeter’s sphere when the shout: “Hey Lady!” stopped the mother’s march. The lively red under her skin deepened as she turned around.

She saw the cashier bound toward her, jiggling with every step. With a grunt, she managed to get the tyrannical boy into the cart’s seat. The passing shoppers slowed as if they knew something extraordinary was about to happen, their necks prying, distorted. The mother’s flip flops and the employee’s sneakers stopped at invisible boundary lines drawn between the women. A moment passed with an exchange of muttered words clipped to the end of it like footnotes. Then there were expletives like sputtering hail charging from the woman whose pail waif-like figure stood in stark contrast to her words. She ended her high pitched crescendo saying, “…get off your high horse, you don’t know what its like!”

She spoke while the underscore of a child’s screech exhausted from his own cries kept the air hot with tension. The bystanders stood waiting for the cashier’s rebuttal, their faces all washed over with the white of shock. “I ain’t losing my job today ‘cause of my body language or facial expression, ‘cause didn’t say nothing,” the cashier said. The loud annoyance in her tone punctuated as she reared back on the syllables, pronouncing each as singular words. “You forgot your bag, lady.”

story by Maxie Steer, all rights reserved