Wordless Wednesday (A Card for You)
photography
Wordless Wednesday (Word on the Street)
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In the Meanwhile…
Wordless Wednesday (Coastal)
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Wordless Wednesday (I Kissed a Prince)
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A Poem & A Picture (Madre’s Mexican Blackbird)
Madre’s Mexican Blackbird
by Janna Hill
She reins me in
Her strong swollen hands tangled inside an unruly mane
Uno ! Dos! Isilencio! Tres!
Three dull thumps convince me to hush
and settle between beefy thighs
Gnarled fingers of assurance tug at my scalp
She plaits my hair with promises
Wisdom weaved among coarse strands of unnumbered mañanas
My head is left tender and spinning
with knitted rows of old wives tales.
**For the final week of NPM I will be posting my own poetry, a mix of published and unpublished. Is that selfish? Yes. Yes, it is. It is also easier — and right now I need easy.
I am grateful to everyone who submitted or suggested a poem. Hopefully we will do it again next year.
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A Poem & A Picture (A Limerick to Lighten Your Mood)
I don’t know about you guys, but I was in dire need of some humor to get me through NPM. I scrolled & scrolled through my inbox and found nothing to make me grin. 😦 But then I remembered a fella named Regis…
Molly
Poem & Picture provided by Regis Auffray
I once met a lass named Molly,
Who made me vulnerable to folly;
I fell for her charms,
Took her in my arms,
Molly was a sweet Irish collie.
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A Poem & A Picture (Last Sleep Best Sleep)
Last Sleep Best Sleep
by Brenda Shaughnessy
Life, this charade of not-death.
Amnesiac of our nights together,
overheard talking in some other voice.
The great fruits of my failure:
silk milk pills with little bitter pits.
Who talks like that? Says we are
ever-locked, leaving everything
petalled and veined the way nature
pretended. Synthesized within
an inch of its life. O the many faces
of facelessness, breathing in the dark –
as if we could shape softness itself,
mold it around us like yams mashed
against a trough by a snuffling snout.
Our own. There’s no way out. Born
to such extra, we are born to lose.
No hairy fingers tapering to threads,
grasping for some lost last use.
Once we were hungry on earth,
soon buried like root vegetables—
to starve the soil as beets do,
growing in our graves.
But now we must remember
our way back to face-to-face,
to eye to eye and hand in hand,
and lock and step and key in hole.
Remembering how not to fall asleep,
we become so desperately drowsy,
and all cells strain to slow to a stop.
All desire to choose otherwise quiets.
No, no one can say we didn’t suffer,
that we weren’t swallowed whole.
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A Poem & A Picture (Incognito)
Incognito (Your Eyes Disguised)
by Cagy Sly
Why do you care who I am?
What is it that makes you hide
the color of your eyes
in sky blue hydro-gel?
Combing smooth your tussled hair
striking up an odd conversation on the pet isle at Wal Mart
inquiring about the breed I am feeding.
Each look, each question — a motive
I comply, casually converse
knowing full well it has nothing to do with dogs
unless you plan to get past my pet?
No.
You are frantic… governed by paranoia
I empathize
my own demons guarded , withering in chains
Why not introduce yourself
ask me outright
what you have spent so much effort to learn
I have no secrets
other than the fact that I know who you are
Fear not – I have a dungeon
full of mysteries
Tit for tat –
What do you see of me behind those tinted blue eyes?
Can you rest now?
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A Poem & A Picture (Being)
Being
by Ale Pena
Memory
is the feeling of cool, April rain
dancing in your hair; seemingly weightless.
Doubt
is the way shadows creep slowly in your eyes
when I ask you about belief.
Your retinas slowly expand,
slowly bloom like the firecrackers we watched explode
in a different season.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
You shake your head and
the droplets in your hair somehow fall, slip, break in light;
1000 rays of colors
being reflected,
condensed,
forgotten,
as you answered:
“Sometimes I think God is in everything.”
I touched your wrist then and
felt the tendons of life moving only by a miracle
that cannot be explained by Math and Science,
whose seemingly useless scratches on paper
cannot begin to comprehend
the feeling of
your heavy arm and your dense Being;
your pulse pumping through every crevice;
or how every vein in your body
forms a map of Existence.
The motion of your hand is a work of Art,
vibrant and alive; a Masterpiece,
Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
I then felt your spirit,
somehow thunderous,
somehow booming,
loud; pulsing through me.
Every nerve alive:
a Universe inside me; inside Us,
together: one.
Moving forward
is a heartfelt release shaking our very core.
You closed your eyes and exhaled.
In and out: the sound of your breathing body from the exhilaration of finding
truth and faith.
We sit in the God-rain and become free.
Ale Pena was 1st place winner of the 2014Teen Poetry Contest sponsored by inForney.com
The Real Janna Hill in 