Local Poets

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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

Barnacle Faith
Grandfather gave me a Children’s Illustrated Bible.
A brightly-colored page showed Jesus
assuring a gaggle of freshly-scrubbed children
that if they had faith
even as small as a mustard seed,
they could order a mountain to move and it would.


My eight-year-old’s logic struggled
to parse this amazing information.
The only mustard I knew
was vivid yellow goop
spread on charred hotdogs
in the summer.
I couldn’t imagine what a mustard seed was,
nor how it could grow mustard.
I didn’t know what faith was either, but I figured
there was a kind of magic in both –
a moving-a-mountain-from-here-to-there sort of magic.
Or a Jack and the Beanstalk sort of magic.
And maybe mustard seeds and faith,
like magic and fairy tales,
were things we’d leave behind
when we grew up.


My Children’s Illustrated Bible
met an ignoble end, shredded
by my grandson’s puppy.
All the mountains I’ve admired
are still firmly rooted in their place.
Faith remains a mystery to me.
And yet today I saw faith
in a living metaphor, a barnacle,
which I’m pretty sure is not in the Bible.


At low tide the pilings of a pier
are covered with moss and barnacles
glued several feet above their only source of food.
The barnacles live trusting
that the tide will rise each day,
high enough to feed them.
Oh, to be consoled
by faith as small as a barnacle,
certain that a benevolent tide
has placed me here,
and a benevolent tide will always rise in time
to feed me yet again.

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 Poet's name  Gary Valet

Give Me a Break
As industry  and traffic slowed
with the lockdown
of human activity
airborne pollution plunged
over Europe and China
and transformed Venice
from an inhabited sewer
to pristine waterways
where we could see again
dolphins and small fish.


What surprises would we realize
if global activity were similarly
suspended and we gave
the world a break.

ALWAYS HOME 
I come from Montana. 
That means I’d rather be alone but in a friendly sort of way. 
Lifting my eyes to the mountains, and the big Big Sky, azure by day, diamond studded at night, my soul captured by vastness impossibly cozy and crisp. Breathing room. 
I learned the hard way. 
That means I’ve wandered in search of other horizons. 
Gasping in Manhattan, smog blinded in L.A., flattened in Illinois, out of place, out of step until Our Lady of the Rockies, moonlit and hands outstretched, welcomes me home. 
Always home. 
Dianne Shiner April 2016 

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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]

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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.

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