One of my very favorite online poetry journals, Atrium Poetry, has published a poem of mine today.

A Couple of Sundays

Thank you to editors Claire Walker and Holly McGill.

27 Years & Pájaros de Barro

 OR We Are Now in The 27 Club

Pájaros de Barro

Hoy son pájaros de barro que quieren volar –Manolo García

Our hands met in the thick clay

of providence’s two-tongued river.

We made a dam in our haste –

birds of clay from sanctified waters.

Our hands entwined and we carried

those clay birds to the sea; the beach

blew its white sand over us all –

a blessing, a bonding, a benediction.

Our hands wrenched apart – drought

in our two-tongued river drained

the sea, left you dry, me full of salt

water our clay birds could not drink.

Our hands turned into my hands which

have held our clay birds up to each

rising tide. I hold them again, feel

your touch as they empty my hands.

24 April 2020 (22 years later)

April 24, 2020

                      For Pep, 22 years later

You tried to steal all of my holidays:

your birthday, just days before mine;

Bloomsday forever the anniversary

of your death. Somehow, until today,

Sant Jordi had escaped. Never a holiday – 

none of mine ever were – World Book Day

is now a thing, but then Sant Jordi was mine

by adoption – count the books in my house

dated April 23^rd – and yours by birth: 

Barcelona being the only thing we had

in common when we succumbed to the thrill

of the first kiss, to the knowledge that we had

arrived at our shared doorstep, our first day

of blind choices, so glaringly obvious

in hindsight.

Those six books, because you made it

to a sixth, line the shelf by our bed, the bed

I haven’t slept in since February, since

travelling home to see our daughter fence

and being trapped by this pandemic. Trapped

at home, not home. In a house I never grew up in,

with a father I barely recognize, far from all

those books, from all those Sant Jordis

on my own, with my girls, with you, without you,

on my own.

Here at my home not home I have nothing to hand

which your hand touched, no inscription, no dates,

no declarations of love. This is my seventeenth

Sant Jordi without you, though you never took it

away. It has taken a pandemic. So now, instead

of Sant Jordi, instead of streets full of books and

young people hawking roses, instead of exhaustion

from kilometers shuffled among human currents

flowing past author signings, spending too much

money, weighted by books I will never finish, I am

quarantined, confined. the first Sant Jordi I have

missed. The first Sant Jordi I have spent

just missing you.

kc 23 April 2020
143

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. This year I'm earning badges for poems with PoMoSco



Every day there's a new badge with instructions on creating a new found poem.
Find mine here. Tag #NaPoMo and play along.

Dust

Vase                      full

of once-red roses

years browned, perfectly

dried. Plucked, all twelve of

them, from the very

expensive flower

arrangements

left  in  the

basement

of the

cr

em

at

ori

u

m

Polvo

Florero                       lleno

de rosas, en su día rojas,
volviéndose, hace años, cada
 vez más marrones, perfectamente
secas. Arrancadas, cada
una de las doce, de los
carísimos arreglos
florales dejados
en el sótano
del
cre
m
at
o
ri
o

Virulence

Strings of a violin snap.

Notes squeal the air

a thunderous shade of purple.

Teeth-snapping jaws

spew venom into the iron

scent of evisceration.

A frenzy of claws screech

across the eye of the hurricane,

through rollercoaster ruins.

Broken words take a victory lap,

having ruptured every eardrum.

It's National Poetry Month at home. From a poetry prompt called 'assay'.
Constructive comments, especially from poets, are most welcome.