Welcome to our Poetry Platform. We are sharing some of our writers’ new poems every Monday. Thank you for reading and thank you for supporting them in their creative endeavor and Center for New Americans in our welcoming endeavor!
ONLY REHEARSAL / Nora Glass
you wouldn’t understand
the lights and everything from them
like if eye-hurt had a temperature
the dry ringlets of velvet
and serendipity on the floor
honeyed wooden people
applesauce legs, widened eyes
sweet soprano’d concentrate
rounded, vibrant, chalky, covered breaths
blushed scattered on the stage
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THE OTHER ME / Michael Favala Goldman
I am jealous of myself
for being yours
for being naked with you
for talking in private
for knowing things
for making you blush.
If I were in my place
I would savor more
each greeting
each inch of skin
think more of myself
be who you deserve.
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COUNTING THE LAST DAYS / Gail Thomas
One green moth masquerading
as a hummingbird dives
into the tattered blooms.
Two white butterflies
circle the bare dogwood.
Three bats swoop to scoop
what mosquitoes remain.
Four nighthawks waltz against
grey clouds.
One scarlet beacon drifts down
to stain the ground,
ahead of what is
inevitable.
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PORTRAIT: COGITO ERGO SUM 2 / D. Dina Friedman
After the painting by Michihiro Yoshida
I.
Here you are again,
emerging out of a clam-shell brain,
that pulses pink. You open
the top toward heaven;
you, who never believed
in prayer or candles,
who only utilized gods
for parking spaces in Manhattan;
you, who believed in the power
of brains despite the eye’s
manipulation, shredding horizons
between real and imagined.
II.
Your back hand pushes down
on this pink cocoon of a brain
as if it’s a Venus fly trap,
ready to snap shut
and hide you like a turtle in its dark shell.
Who’s in control here
You, or the clam-shaped wall?
Your gaze shifts up as if expecting
a message from the heavens,
the answer to your question
on the limitations of thinking.
III.
Thoughts are pearls
and colors have luster.
The gray matter, pinkened,
blued. I think therefore I am.
The brain’s candle shoots its DNA
infinity-shaped, past
the sky’s horizon. Does it matter
if a thought has the weight
of fact, or the potential of delusion,
your vision hinged in this shell?
How hard you worked
to keep it open.