Local Poets
Use the Contact form to submit a poem. Please include your name, the title of the poem and an introduction if you would like.
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Poet's Name Cynthia Trenshaw
All-Night Laundromat Recent research says that while we sleep our brain cells shrink, making room to let the sap they swim in wash away the toxins of the day. Tonight I crawl between the sheets, pull the covers up and nuzzle in my pillow balancing my brain like laundry baskets filled with scraps of images and urges soiled in hours among the wakeful: memories splotched with joy or stained with bitterness, intentions frayed around the edges, well-worn thoughts and barely-used ideas, pockets linted with exhaustion. I sigh, curl arms and legs more fetally, sink deeper in the laundry room of sleep, begin to separate the braincell undies from the jeans and cleaning rags, whites apart from smudging colors, mental fragiles sorted by themselves in piles along the edges of my brain. Then, when I let go to deepest sleep, cerebral fluids start to slosh, enigmatic, automatic, silent. I’d never know that anything had happened in the Laundromat of Night, except that when I wake I find fresh dreams hung out to dry, or left untethered, scattering across the dawn. [first published in Maine Review, Fall 2015] Poet's Name Gary Valet
Cobblestones Staccato footsteps carry me over the medieval path leading to another church, castle, or prince bishop’s quarters. My feet curl around what, in a previous lifetime, lived In the belly of a ship providing ballast that kept the course true and upright the well of gravity holding fast to the cobbled core. Upon arriving at the destination, having transported the substance of desire the belly having fulfilled its task the cobbles are moved to a resting place until their appointed placement is decided. A stone well laid offers transit for many generations suspended above eroding dirt embedded in sand they withstand erosion by hoof or wheel or foot. Rut resistant they bear the burden of commerce with nary a squeak . So choose: unending layers of asphalt or stand a little rock on its head and become the geologic way. |