10-line poems from readers like you

Opera Night for Christie
by Sonya R.

On the drive to the opera I ask my sister if she is happy and she breathes in,
considering. Oh, sometimes I think I could chuck it all and go off
on my own she says, and we ponder what it would be to walk away from
mortgage, meals, musts, meetings, mail. Our children headed into the world are safe
enough to weather fallen mothers who call from Florence reporting on the state of gelato.
Still we stay rooted in something we don’t know that we like anymore, our days like
those frozen bags of dinner you hope will be good if you can add the right exotic
ingredient. When the curtain opens, she’s huge in turquoise and cinnabar and a voice
that quakes the world, and we lean toward each other, my sister and I
imagining moving into all the edges of the room, what could be if we let us be that big.

10 lines in 10 minutes flat
by Mara L.

pearl grey sky and twice as cold
kicked the sun out an hour ago.
me in a muted green chair
like big hairy baby
tucked into a peapod costume for an anne geddes calander: april.
it's october now, and i'm sitting here, writing
wishing this was a letter to every friend i have
Wishing so hard my blood warms.
the letter, direct, bold and driven as the asphalt roads in the Southwest.


Oldest friend and her lover
by Lisa J.

My best and oldest friend took a lover and with it our everyday e-mails
-- our across-the-Rockies howdies and isn’t-writing-hard and marriage too!
and here’s-what’s-true-about-my-life-today
once effortless, are gone. She has taken a lover; she takes her mysteries to him
so I have discovered other things on the Internet
the cashmere coat, for example, deeply on sale, just arrived;
tomorrow the espresso machine from Ebay, and I swear I didn’t even mean to buy those white linen napkins.
I have other friends, you know; even some in my own town
but suddenly my day is crowded with moments requiring the warmth
of cashmere; the zing of espresso, the purity of white linen.


Mending
by Judith F.

I know the pace of the ticking clock
As I lay here, recovering
A pace normal life hardly allows the experience of
The anticipation of three weeks of rest on the couch
Movies stacked high, ready for viewing
A pile of mending close by, lest my fingers get bored
books spilling over on the coffee table, all as of yet, unread
The anticipation of down time while recovering from knee surgery
and the reality of the same are hardly recognizable as distant relatives
never-mind close cousins, au-revoir, as I must now sleep, yet again.



Untitled
by Andrea P.

Turn in the direction of life, he said.
From the elevator, follow the carpet, away from the metal covered hallway, to the office by the window --simple directions.
Turn in the direction of life, my father said.
Let the violins rip your heart out, let the bad joke make you giggle, let your body work and sweat and lengthen, leave your family, start your own life.
Did he turn in the direction of life 50 years ago today, when
His hands let go of his land, his mother, his brother, photos of the family dog, the family bird, the house with the walnut tree in the back, at the end of the tram line?
When he took his new wife to America, after falling in love with jazz and allowing the sounds of Radio Free Europe to waft out the partially curtained window into the Budapest Street, begging for revolt and freedom?
You can’t go backwards after crossing the line, like you can’t put your car in reverse over the horrible looking teeth at the park gate, because you know if you go back, it would be ugly. The ripping, the tearing. Better to choose, to decide to go in the direction of life.


On Procrastination
by Kyra A.

I am reading an inconveniently good novel.
Midterms bearing down and I rely on infrequent
library stints and then latening nights.

It's getting bad, the amount of pressure needed to start.
I eat peanut butter, do laundry, trim my nails.
Do yoga, help a friend find a Halloween dress,
even write, or try to.
I wait for the silent hours in the true middle
of the night, when finally
I am out of excuses.


Untitled
by Larissa M.

why
won't
she
sleep?
big yawns
dark room
loving cuddles
soft voice
milky milk...
those big blues don't want to miss a thing!


Aloha Laura
by Jen C.

"I live life to the fullest but take my time doing it."
She wrote it in her high school year book just the picture of her beautiful smiling face.
We had many adventures together that would support that statement.
Mother of two young children, wife, friend, animal lover too.
Their plane went down over Nevada a few days ago.
Rescuers had to camp out over night before they could get to it to confirm they all died.
Her husband, self-professed dare devil and rarely at home, piloted the plane.
She and the kids had joined his latest adventure so they could spend time together.
The email chains from the last few days of high school friends recalling our antics of 20+ years ago have made me laugh and cry.
Aloha, Laura and your beautiful Ohana.


Our Strands of Time
by a.r. morgan

Stranded in time, a strand of time
we string ourselves together with
touch and shared laughter,
connecting our lives with moments –
a pearled connection.
Then those moments go unraveling
shedding them selves from our daily lives –
without our commitment, our consent.
We once again become strangers and our moments
become stranded in time like a strand of time.

sleeplessness and love

1:30 a.m. and my lover is sleeping soundly
while I, twisting, needy, eyes tilting wildly open,
lie adjacent, tracing shapes in the darkness,
flexing my feet, and wondering if, on this coast,
the light will come any sooner.

And though I know tomorrow I will wilt too early,
begging for a nap at noon, perhaps, or a shorter walk,
or a second cup of coffee, and though I am ever-so-slightly
jealous of my lover, who can sleep past jetlag,
past the strange quiet of New England in late fall,
and who has managed to be lulled by the covers
of this unfamiliar bed, these foreign pillows.
Despite the disadvantage of lying awake
at this late and faulty hour,
I don't mind this sleeplessness.

Instead, I listen to the sound of breathing beside me,
the warm elixir I have come to love, a sound I measure
in slow and tender draughts. The air fibrillates with tiny,
somnolent hums, the darkness pausing around this rising body,
these easy, slumbering limbs, and all I can think about is
how beautiful this oxygen is, the caress it makes against my cheek,
against my fluttering eyelids, the curve of my left shoulder.

The night edges on, millimeter by millimeter, and yet
I would not mind if it lasted forever, this silence,
this generous reprieve,
this one beating promise after another.

words words words

I lied to myself about what I could do with you.
I gave you muscle, mass, meaning, and motive,
imbued you with a heart, and lungs, and legs
watched you power up, rev your tiny, beating engines
saw you scan the open field, eye the target, gauge the distance,
felt the flex of your syllables, heard the music of your consonants,
your smooth vowel ellipses. I elicited your shadows, your echo,
the brilliant architecture of your naked form. I tasted you,
all of you, gave you sugar and salt and hot, hot pepper,
tipped my tongue into your vanilla, your cinnamon,
your lemon rind, your perfect cup of coffee.
All this I did for you, words, and yet,
and yet you’ve failed me.

Or maybe I’ve failed you, lied to myself about
what I could do with you, tried to woo and win lovers,
paint conversations, solve arguments, deliver news,
I pulled you on like a jacket, like a hat, like perfume,
and then, like a placket of buttons,
I unclosed you, I disclosed you, I revealed the insides of things,
and through this I thought I was unclosing myself, disclosing myself,
revealing my own rumbling, rollicking insides.

Instead, words, I see this irony: you are clothing,
not sheer and simple but often brutally opaque, a sheath of iron,
an armature of armor sometimes, a fantastic, futile piece of work
that rules undemocratically, since you require such rigorous
understanding from your intended, some intimate knowing,
the patience of translation, an ear that can bend low enough to catch
your whispery nuances, your swishing in the gutter,
your silvery, slippery dancing, and who,
who can ever bend that low?

I lied to myself about what I could do with you,
and still, words, you are my wayward friend, my listless companion,
my constant breath, my ever-present lover.
You sidle up like firelight, like a flicker of memory
warm as brandy, liquid and easy as sleep,
and I can’t help but reach for you in the night,
in the darkest dark, reach from your mouth to my mouth,
and plead for your nimble, tender, devastating kiss.

collision / collaboration

Let me tell you a story of us. How we walk, unhurt,
on our various roads, ambling among the sidelined clover,
stooping low to tie shoes, pick dimes out of the dirt,
watch a month of sunsets go by, sleep, then start over.

It would be so easy to stay sashaying along the fences,
skipping over fallen petals, langorous when it rains, or still
as silence, as the period that ends all sentences.
But we get tired of the flat expanse of highway. We want hill,

movement, some shape to mark our steps, and felicity
comes in the form of a fork in the road, a sign
that says, Merge ahead. Words full of electricity
and yearning and promise. I see you and think "You're mine"

now, although we are never quite the other's, not in the way
the storybooks would have it, two shadows fusing into one
as the closing credits roll. In this story, we simply
intersperse ourselves, dappling our color where there is none,

entwining with the other's easy brightness, and grateful
for the chance of this vicarious pleasure, this larger vision
of fertile acreage, the blooms remarkably faithful
even as the asphalt stings from our collision.

This is what love is, I tell myself. Not just the smack
of a road against the other but something smaller, unassuming.
Two roots taking hold of themselves, then climbing back
in tandem, mottling the earth with new and vigorous blooming.

nothing so permanent

the scar
the disaster
the gravel slide
the leap
the look
the speed at which the wheels spin
the dilemma
the dream
the idea
the whisper in the ear
the friend who dares
the wish to impress
the care
the carelessness
the promise of safety
the purchase of a helmet
the birthday gift
the collaboration of legs
the lungs of a 10-year-old
the picture in the catalogue
the need for control
the need for freedom
what am I good at?
what do I know?
who am I?
how do I molt from the smallness
that is everything I touch?

and so it goes
a gift is purchased
a promise is made
a dare is made
the legs enact their destiny
and a chasm is nearly bridged by gears and muscle,
a lightning burst of pure conviction.

i say nearly
because there is nothing so permanent
as the moment just before things end
when the wheels begin to fail and the body coils
to catch the fall as squarely as it can.

in that one palpitating second before the wild swing
of the handlebars erases the possibility
of emerging from the rubble unscathed,
the girl cannot believe what she is seeing,
her legs like arrows,
the acreage of her body incalculable,
the way her arms are opening
to such blue and cloudless sky.