Five Poems
A Little Night Music
she says that damn sunflower is such an insufferable tune: it lets itself into the house: in the middle of the night: searching for the sun: annoyed by the empty dish of a moon: it creaks the stairs: pulls open the doors: a real poltergeist: then she droops against the frame: her shadow a silent twin who has that look of a girl in a window who cannot go out and play: and you feel the chill of the petaled presence: static electricity enough to make your seed-black hair stand on end: snake wildly: like ribbons coming undone in the wind: you can feel the broken stalk of the thing: you hear its siren voice: calling everyone awake: the cracking of seeds on the sanguine carpet: echoing down the hall: your sister she says that damn sunflower… : as she grips a torn petal: you can make out the body of it at the top of the stairs: the abandoned eye: searching for its god: you are remembering a passage from a movie: or a book: or play: where the sunflower is a symbol for life and death: you want to cradle it in your arms: hold onto the last moments of the old day: not crying: but humming something nearly forgotten: some rhyme from younger days
Natural Selection
at the manatee matinée: young girls were swooning: over the watery-eyed: whiskered: star’s face: full as the projected moon: above them in the darkened room: the boys rolled their large pupils: wondering at the attraction: on the towering movie canvas: love plays out: with all its tragedies: as the antagonists win: the little battles: and the main characters must learn: to embrace hope: or faith: or luck: perhaps miracles: but mainly believe in themselves: as a conduit: of higher power: that wins the war: while the boys view a male star: as their own antagonist: drawing away the attraction: from potential mates: there is no explanation: for why they stare at a star: or moon so far: from the warmer touch: of what swims patiently: beside them: on any given Saturday afternoon
The Third Eye
You are a red door: locked from the outside: when I place my eye to your peep hole: there is the darkened lobby of you: the strobe and party: in the next room: and the quieted shadows: and dimmed bulbs upstairs: every poster of your childhood is tacked upon the walls: in this room you are: a ceiling fan: mocking the gentle broom: leaning against the cold bricks of a wall: I no longer remember building: but rub my calluses anyway
Soft Watch Put in the Appropriate Place to Cause a Young Ephebe to Die and Be Resuscitated…
O Time: O ghosts: O soft watches: we think so much of our time: and our ghosts and hope: that our internal clocks will soften: like ripe brie: O third-eye clock dreaming: dreaming of the slow: hands making their way: oblong and elliptical: through the space of mind: O young hero: out there on the rocks: painting them colorful and dramatic: O dynamic artist-atomic: you are there: with statues: brilliant white and tragically posed: begging for color: O pigmentor: what is time: if not the yellowed ghost of color: rising at sunset: tag this moment: with a polyethylene blue and cadmium red: stop it at the gates: keep it from escaping: this is always on your watch
for Visual Piracy (aka Neil Women158 Parkinson)
Anura
you say the word and a frog arcs into the air: it doesn’t matter where you are: say it enough times really fast: you get a biblical response: this is your gift: your super power: which may not seem like much: to be the amphibian queen: how many nights did you stay awake thinking of your alter ego’s name: Anura—intelligent without all the baggage: you once stopped a group of debs from picking on a nerd: with a leaping green body for each mean girl: you stopped a bank robbery with a rain of frogs: stunned, mouths agape: they froze there watching the sky (dumb really when you think about it): guessing it was God’s immediate intervention of their sins: and the cops took them away: —crime in the area was down for a whole year after that: the credit never went to you: divine intervention stole the headlines again: but you were never in this for the attention
for Stephanie Kartalopoulos
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J. P. Dancing Bear is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently, Family of Marsupial Centaurs (Iris Publishing Group, 2012) and Inner Cities of Gulls (2010, Salmon Poetry), winner of a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award. His poems have been published in Mississippi Review, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Verse Daily and many other publications. He is editor for the American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press. Bear also hosts the weekly hour-long poetry show, Out of Our Minds, on public station, KKUP and available as podcasts.