#thesideshow April 19th 2016 Fuck Passover by Lisa Badner-Day #19 of National Poetry Month
April 19, 2016
#thesideshow April 21st 2016 Four poems by Genelle Chaconas -National Poetry Day #21
April 21, 2016
Three poems
by
Michelle Brooks
Obituary for A Neon Angel
The city, alive with sirens, makes you
long for other days, for the lost ones.
The causalities of your youth stay hidden,
buried beneath the darkness you cast
in every direction. The night casts its own
shadows onto your small stake of the known
world. If you love me, you will tell me your
whole heart, you whispered to various men,
not knowing that diminishment seeps
into everything around it. You become
a crime scene, the tape around a body long
removed, all color drained by morning.
Arson
Fires burned behind every window
in my first grade assignment to draw
a house. Fifteen suns blazed in the sky,
and strange flowers bloomed in the yard
where children didn’t play. Who lives
in your house? the teacher asked me.
Nobody lives there. Curlicues of smoke
streamed from the multiple chimneys.
I didn’t include a door. Someone else
might have made up a story that included
a dramatic rescue. In my story the fires
always burned. The why didn’t matter. I
only knew what I saw when I closed my eyes.
Applebee’s Hotel Bar – Boca Raton, Florida
A man walks into a bar.
He tells me this isn’t a joke,
that he wants to obliterate
the past week. The week no
longer exists except in himself
so that’s where he begins. He
forgoes the chicken quesadillas
for shot after shot of Jim Beam.
He means business. I don’t know
what went wrong and before
long, neither does he. He’s not
from here. None of us are. This
is the river from which we drink
and wonder how we can sing
the songs of Zion in a foreign
land. People call this place God’s
waiting room, but isn’t everywhere?
Michelle Brooks has published Make Yourself Small (Backwaters Press) and Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia Press). A native Texan, she’s spent much of her adult life in Detroit, Michigan, her favorite city.
