The Painter’s House
Well since there’s still light walk around
stand on the porch
cup hands around eyes peering in
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Poetry
Makeover
Laura Cesarco Eglin’s poem, “Makeover,” appears in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Summer 2019 issue. Blue lipstick in remembrance of days of intense cold of nails turning blue and lips to match when she’s tired she applies eyeshadow where the bags under her eyes should be, she feels free to mark her spirits rising the red lipstick
Black Ecstatic Ode
Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd
Street trolley
To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet and sugarcane blood
To the shooting nerve through the left hip and lower spine
To those flying gods on their routes
Praise to the red-headed Rasta and his ganja-laced T-shirt
To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign
To the sign which reads: “I’m not homeless, I’m just Black”
Praise to the barbers trying to calm the fatherless boys in their chairs
To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing
To soothing
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Alloy
“Love/it was exactly like this/when, for the first time,/we stepped toward each other/like two people folding a bedsheet”
To Silvestre Revueltas of Mexico, In His Death
Your heart like a cathedral/covers us in this instant, like the/ sky/and your song, loud and magnificent, and your volcanic/ tenderness, /fills to the roof like a burning statue.
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what you’d find buried in the dirt under charles f. kettering sr. high school (detroit, michigan)
broken teeth. lost retainers. crumpled letters written to counselors
and discarded for illegible handwriting. phone lists of
abortion clinics. deflated valentine’s day balloons with
trampled white ribbon. sales ads on bassinette sets.
Ode on Bees
The summer populations of flying insects/have fallen by more than 80 percent/in the past quarter century. This fact/is a fact I can’t think of very long.
The Wall
At her back, the sword. At her feet, the ravine./Impossible to advance. To turn back. Impossible.
Your Suitcase: Selections from On the Path
Nostalgia doesn’t melt like water underfoot
doesn’t climb on the back of a horse
to be carried far from our hearts
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