dogtrax

A place to gather words before they get lost.

How old are you when you receive this poem?

I am sixteen years old

You're wide awake, now, I remember, the home shaken by that midnight call on the phone

I am sixteen years old

Your parents, woken, rushed out, in their panic - they've left you alone

I am sixteen years old

You know, in this moment of pounding heart and uncertainty, without being told

I am sixteen years old

that the world's been splintered, like the tree you'll see, down the bend in the road

I am sixteen years old

And he was nineteen

for OpenWrite

Sit with me, won't you, in our quiet spot, serene, beneath the green eaves?

Something in the brain broke in the middle of a line -

one second, we knew it; the next, we did not -

their words bent suddenly into a long breath of gibberish -

like speaking in tongues -

And something like that, Lord? Something like that, in someone so young?

for OpenWrite

Mash-It-Up Poem

A trip to Laredo is like breaking open the sky. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man

Each long row of wheat meets the eye Bake me a cake as fast as you can

before it sloughs into desert, where the occasional hawk, Roll it, pat it

in a few concentric turns, identifies a weak movement. and mark it with a B

I know this place. The place in between.

for OpenWrite

With lines borrowed from 'Eating the Moon in Cotulla, TX' by Analicia Sotelo and Pat-A-Cake nursery rhyme

https://poets.org/poem/eating-moon-cotulla-tx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat-a-cake,_pat-a-cake,_baker%27s_man

The Great Misplacement; Where the snow has gone and left ski pants on hangers

for Algot

Sleepy seeds might bring the coming bloom, barely Spring; In Winter, we dream

River stones, rattling over time, change form, but still, remain

Daily Create for NWP's collaborative poem

Ivory struck, rung bass into treble in harmony or solo Piano

An Elfchen poem for OpenWrite

She wondered if the air of the poem, if spoken in verse, could fill the balloon -

if her words, whispered, were the size of a quiet room

for MastoPrompt

Red, like the sunset, the horizon, violet, just before the dark