Search and Rescue

We will find you fickle friend where

the grass parts ways for snakes and

where wealthy women make talk of

the men who feed them- dressed in

summer colors with matching drinks

and cackled laughter, we will

find you in the song notes they sing

to each other when sun gives

way to moonshine,

 

Search the spaces between lightning

strikes thunderclaps underneath

the bed sheets of a boy who won’t

stop reading when the lights go

out, we will look for you inside

half empty cereal boxes,

perhaps we will dig you out of

the sandcastles we buried

in birthday cards,

 

Where Mozart breathes through the fingers

of a child and where his

mother’s tears fall as he plays for

her the first time, wherever

his father drinks his last drink and

beneath the floorboards of the

home he broke with the backside of

an open fist, where water

drips red with blood,

 

 

Where tiles chipped like a tooth in

the mouth of a household grow

moldy from the inside out, where

books beg to be read aloud

words beg to be let out from the

birdcage chest hiding beneath

the breasts of a wasted woman

who thought she found you last time

she lost herself,

 

We will find you in ourselves the

next time we try moving on

the next time we paint our faces

with stage makeup and make up

another reason to look like

the photographs we hide from

new lovers, next time you love us we

will have climbed a few miles

in search of god,

 

Not your god but ours- the one that

carves its home in the poem

that beats beneath our breastplates, that

makes sense of signal fires

we set as warning signs for the

times we forget you are still

coming, the times we find your foot

prints in gardens we use to

grow our spines back.

 

Reviews

[Glen Yumang Manese]

The development of this verse gives a lot to thinks about with the reader...I had to magnify the page to read your work...may be you didn't notice the font is quite small...but I got to read the whole verse...