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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3917 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Bones Lauriette (Laurie Byro) It’s midnight, the time of ghosts. I feel you before I smell you. I have carried you, all these years, inside. But tonight you sidle up on my porch like a crab, a sidewinder. You with your broken body, your patched eye. The fall that left you on the curb, a tree with a twisted trunk. The hurricane that took your eye, left you an empty socket and filled it with grief— with words to make poems. Jim, the neighbors have gone to bed. I smell your sweat, your bike’s exhaust. I smell the mulch of the pile of bones that is you. The trees are nearly empty of leaves, a few gold coins left for God to spend. My right eye, Jim, is blind tonight. I wait for words, the consolation prize of poems that burst forth like buds, like rolled up dollars on a money tree. You rocked me, promised we’d carry each other, slipped me in your pocket, your lucky gold coin. I want tell you, on this night of soft rain and ghosts as I watch that leaf tumble: Catch me, Jim. I’m falling. |
