This week’s collection!
5043.
the baby yanks
the carpet catches the pearls
hitting the floor in a silent spatter
5044.
The ballet teacher
her hard eyes
following a ball game on the bar TV
5045.
her eyes with
irises of blue-green quartz
her tight red lips set like stone
5046.
You can make reservations
or have reservations –
which one is it, again?
5047.
the bartender hovers
the brats quarrel
I polish the pears and weep.
5048.
Secrets and that other type of graveyard talk,
the epitaph –
they do intertwine on your father’s headstone
5049.
It will be years before you can (if you do)
grow out of shapeless and into shapely
This distresses your mother very much right now
though you are not concerned one way or another
5050.
It is a wonderful disaster
A dire happy and a catastrophic magnificent
We jump around like water drops on a hot grill
That one quick moment of glee and then…pfft!
5051.
he answers with such reluctance
his words squeak along on ungreased wheels
that wobble like those on a broken shopping cart
5052.
a very clean bathroom
its sharp pale shapes coming into bright focus
what a place in which to deal with this awful hangover
5053.
in the chill surf the pebble gives birth
an industrious cloud wraps mist around the baby
the crow gropes to explain what he saw
Only the leaves on the trees believe him.
5054.
diagnosed dead five years ago but
the kind of person I happen to be
I continue to live and torment her right back
5055.
Frail rubbery fish
his fins torn and ragged at the edges
But he is enough. He swims past the hook.
5056.
I see her in the same way
as a 4,000-year-old broken shopping cart
appears a treasure to a future archeologist
5057.
Now only a few birds
mope along the shoreline.
Pain for the rest of your life.
5058.
exhausted by Ell and Ned’s version of the cha cha
the carpet wrinkled itself up
flung itself out from under them
They never noticed. On and on they danced.
5059.
Rain rising slowly outside the window
The salt drops lifting through the almost-quiet
How much do you remember of these souls
floating past?
5060.
skilled at deception
this blue faux-satin mermaid dress
and its spicy black leather strap details
Claudia McGill Writes Poetry, Did You Know That? 
All good. Favorites: 5050 and 5052.
Thank you. I always enjoy seeing which ones different people like best. I am partial to the hangover one too.
Great collection…I like how in the first one something that could happen very quickly and could be distressing (unless you didn’t really like those pearls) is slowed down to
a sensory scene.
Thank you. I like the way you describe it, because that is how I felt. If the pearls hit the tile floor, they would go all over at high speed. The carpet just kinds of lets them down gently. Somehow this sequence ocurred to me (I have no idea why, I am not wearing a pearl necklace, there is no baby here, though I do have carpet!) and I wrote this all at once, as if I were witnessing it.
5046, 5053. You know I can never resist a crow. (K)
Yes. They are the kind of bird I would like to be.