Four recycled poems for your consideration:
1. This one is in my new book, Dating Tips for Conservatives (2017) (for sale at link). It was written 5 years ago.
V
A girl named Bambi
left a heart-shaped box of chocolates
in my locker in sixth grade.
The photo of the nurse and the sailor
on V-J Day by Albert Eisenstaedt,
the woman dressed all in white
and arched like a crescent moon.
Eve Ensler with black bangs,
black dress and bright red lips.
Dating tips for Conservatives:
Take her to a gun range.
Shooting some rounds with your girlfriend
is a great way to spend Valentine’s Day.
Cartoon caption:
If I can’t buy you dinner,
at least let me pay you for sex later.
Eros with arrows,
again with the shooting.
2. This one was published in a contributors series at Voxpoetica.com in 2010
Our Volition Was in Not Turning
Scraps of paper
lifted on a careless wind,
these are my verses tonight.
You came to me so –
the familiar face on the
peeling wheat-paste poster
blown across the square,
come alive at my feet,
deft motion of fate’s blind impulse.
This wind was not of our doing.
Our volition was in not turning,
in being that shape in the flow.
Take my hand, you said,
step with me into this landscape,
let us tumble like leaves, let us curl
like tendrilled smoke.
It is the same with this poem –
it found me on a windy night,
and when I did not turn away,
that was the beginning of love.
3. Another, from 2013
Shape of a Heart
We play the game called Exquisite Corpse —
you with the curlicued lust lines
of your tragic fine-point pens,
I with charcoal-smudged
weather reports and raucous blackbirds —
two sides unseen of the same
folded paper’s fearful symmetry.
I hand you the scalpel, Dottoressa,
and turn away at the first red spots
beading along the curve you cut,
a rotated cardioid, the rolling circle
that traces a two-lobed valentine.
4. Also in my Dating Tips book (for sale at link), from 2015
The Apparati of Flight
Sinew hinges, struts made of hollow bone,
feathers to catch the air, to gather it up
and shape it into dreams that hold us
Aloft. Forward we pump ourselves, wingbeats
and heartbeats, feathers aligned against the pull
of prevailing winds. Hope, yes, is one thing
With feathers. Another is the egg. Whole
or broken, it is a beautiful reminder. But
this sky, too, is made of pale eggshells and
The sun, a yellow-bright yolk. Take wing. This day
is born to flight, it calls us, crow-caw, goose-honk,
and we are lifted on the buoyant light of love.
Lower Sunnyslope Opera 