Sheree La Puma (2 poems)
Crimson Blooms
Hijacked
by the wind,
dropped down towards earth
like a used lead condom
a winter twig – unwraps
her skeleton – unzips
her buds.
Bare, shameless, transmuted,
a first-fruit offering, quiet–still-glad,
on a rutted asphalt altar.
Waiting –
like a seed to be planted.
Listening-
for the prophecy of spring.
It is near,
a huge red dragon-
four mechanical brooms,
scrubbing, erasing, rewriting history.
Eating microscopic bits
Of lemon rind.
Unguarded –
undone –
the winter twig
submits
to the insidious black tires
of a 460-pound street sweeper.
The driver never looks back.
This Is A Test
I am wife.
I meet a man
who is not my husband,
in a bar in Cincinnati.
a ghost that knows
my language, carries
a scent of us on his
skin.
I think of sister’s
dead daughter, son,
my own, gone long
enough to bury. I am
winter, your favorite
month, seeking release
in other people’s
treasures.
Body like a sieve,
stripping leaves from
branch. Words like teeth,
rolling ‘round my tongue,
loose then swallowed. In
the round of my belly, the
weight of a bitter world
announcing its
exit.
Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Juxtaprose, Heron River Review, The Rumpus, O:JA&L, Plainsongs, The Main Street Rag, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, The London Reader, Bordighera Press - VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and taught poetry to former gang members.