POEM STORE ARCHIVES

2026

I once had half its colour and twice the metaphor, prism hinting at a truth trapped in a moth. Just tell me what it really is, a curved line in a purple petal, blue dot in a ceramic vase. Heliophilic atom straining to catch a delicate whiff of light and space. Have you pricked yet a hole small enough to spot the miracle, the azaleas on the ground, orchids on your tabletop, blood on my fingertips? Did you witness both their birth and death day? Hope drips from my lips contoured to separate flesh from glamour and the fish swallows me whole, spits me out into a glittering black pond as wide as the sky feels in the first week of June before summer gets us all and I play the waffle cone and gasoline over until my brain forgets its coordinates and a cloud lands in my lap. There is a season and you are already in it, purpling. How pretty it all is, how any of it is, in the right light under the right eyes.

2026

Stasis was an illusion, a flaccid confrontation luring you towards the ease of stillness. Marketed it as something beautiful and dangerous, something on the precipice of unattainable, just the way your brain likes it. But something inside you is overripe, a horse with no mind for seams only edges. When they ask you how you want it, this time you know, get it with pulp. Each burst of orange on your tongue, each sunset a stand-in for the rises you miss because you stayed up too late looking for yourself in the dark. It doesn’t matter if it’s going up or down when you look out far enough. The way you asked for friction five birthdays ago, didn’t know what to call it other than a dream. Now because you started, the ball bounces, the poached egg breaks and bleeds, delicate matters make grief and you march forward with stains on your tshirt and juice on your fingers. Echoes of a frantic simulation in the other room, soldiers chanting “go go go”. But this is not a test. This time you see, you want them to see. Traffic cones laid out, the smell of gas lingering in the parking spot. To the hardware store, back in five with paints and a mask because nothing fits into your goal-tracking apps and productivity hacks anymore. There is no time, only change; the extinction of coins. No elevator to take you to a promised land. Only a step, and then another, and then there was light and dark and wonder and life.

2026

You worry your stars have left you behind. The sun once beckoned and taunted its fingers in your gravity, baby dream as delicate as a leaf on a tree at the top of a cliff hanging on as the season changes; it goes up and it goes down and without a calendar to tell time we go by hunch and stars and pray there is no mistake. Science says not a mistake; more like experiment tangled up in faith. Hold your breaths until probability takes precedence over certainty. So we did. Sometimes these things take time, generations of atomic arrangements lego-ed until they make survival then sense, then one day it got too wild we had to shimmy it down to five. The cliff melts, we pull the line to the end but it was only the tip. And this is still the sky that belongs to cherry blossoms and jet trails when minds are too foggy and the view too crystalline, the petals too sharp, your wishes too granted. The muggy blue void still waits to swallow you. You used to run and scream. Now there’s a butterfly in your chest. You hold, not knowing if it will burst or fly. Maybe this is the dream, maybe you are still a theory. And what if you were the scientist not the creator? You wouldn’t abandon the project. You’d keep testing. More love, wonder, and fries. Something surprising after sense. A flower sprouting from the spot on the ground concrete meets a raindrop out here on a suspended beam of light. When you ask for proof, it will come to rearrange you again and again until you come with more questions not better answers.