The Other Mother
Michele, with her dark
flashing eyes
and taste
for The Safety in Roy,
Held in her arms my wide-eyed boy,
frightened by the siren that called his mother away.
She filled up that void
at the start of each day.
She taught him to
whistle and tie his kindergarten shoes.
And the hole in our hearts
became just a bruise.
12/25/2014
Michele
Michele’s star has a tail shaped like a heart,
a blazing flash of energy that wants for nothing and everything simultaneously
and Michele never sleeps peacefully
unless she has caught a boatload of fish
and had all the fun that goes along with it.
12/25/14
Gun
We share a memory of a man we once loved
who kept a gun pointed directly at us, always.
12/25/14
Conundrum
When we grow
we hurt,
and when we hurt we grow.
When we breathe
we begin to live
and
when we live, we begin to breathe,
and
when we learn
we slowly forget
that we never understood
life at all.
12/25/14
IF
If, in heaven,
we get points for cleanliness,
Michele and Cheryl
are in.
12/27/14
Dear Christmas
Goodbye!
Goodbye!
The new year is nigh.
Your spoils are withered
your music passe
Back to the turmoil of our daily assay.
12/25/14
-Somethings
20-something mothers,
newly displaced from court to home
sharing secrets, counting miles
as we ran.
30-something mothers,
we fretted and struggled
to manuever the waters
of adulthood,
as we drove.
40-something women
we painfully sought
our solace in love and work.
as we celebrated.
50-something grandma
and school marm still
trying to find sense
where there is none.
as we love a man and some dogs
12/27/14
Shana
A vision of this beauty,
focused silently on
her childhood, with the face of
Benjamin Franklin
as he wrote out his blueprint for the
postal service.
Her light orange hair cascading
down around her tiny shoulders.
so intent was she, in the Bell Street house.
Her spirit, as years passed, remained stoic,
her mane luxurious, her disposition accepting but not conforming
A vision—a construction worker trapped inside her queenly quietude.
CLR 2014
Marriage
When ‘I do’
didn’t work out for us, we changed it to ‘I don’t'. She
‘did’ for 15 years longer than I ‘did’, and then she
‘did’ some more!
1/1/15
KALI
We have followed each other to Kali,
from one hair dresser to the next,
together and with much
trepidation,
since each of us values our lovely hair
over almost anything,
except maybe
our butts.
CLR 2015
Erica Bounds
Erica Bounds through life
with her hopes wrapped
several times around beauty and love and
a baby named
Taylor.
2015
Good News!
Right now we are older
than we have ever been
Bad News
Right now we are younger than
we will ever
be.
again.
CLR 2015
Life in Mistakes
To have been alive
for 50 years and not
to have made mistakes…
would mean that we were
not alive
for 50 years, at all.
Mistakes poke us like
badges, our proof
of risks taken,
which is the name of life.
Expansion
includes
contractions.
contractions.
hurt.
CLR 1-27-15
BURNED OUT
One day
”I might be late ”
became
”I might be dead”
That day
I decided
to stay in bed.
CLR 5/21/14
Irrelevant Tree, Irrelevant Me
I have no
eloquent words
for this page,
but creation is coursing through me and now demands expression here.
on this paperwhich was once a tree
until it grew to the point that we no longer
recognized it
as necessary
in it’s original form.
Cray 2016
SILLY POEM
If I could write a poem for you
and you’d write one for me,
We wouldn’t ever need to read them,
they’d be the same, you see?
CLR 2017
Ocean of Love-
(originally intended for Andrew and Jeanette, but adapted and adopted by Loren and Michele)
See me, I’m the ocean,
why the sky is so blue,
but I have reds and yellows and green colors too.
The sky eats my reds and my yellows and greens and all that it shows are blue in-betweens.
And your love is the ocean, the sky is still blue, and paddling round it
You beautiful two
Who knew where it started or knows how it mends,
It’s reflections of oceans,
And it never ends.
June 11, 2017