She threw back her head in prayer
opened her mouth wide
and swallowed all the songbirds
that willingly came to her.
When she spat them out,
stars formed, then spewed back
baffled humans
that became people who knelt on the tips of her braids
Five of those devils started a circus,
painting their faces with blueberries and chestnuts.
They circled her, riding on malnourished speculation;
they trained her to riddle, fed her granular questions.
After the first three steps on the high-wire, she remembered no more.
(for RDC)
If he painted
only what he knows
he'd paint
in industrial greens.
Up and down a gradated scale,
broad wrought iron steps blend
light
to
dark, then
dark
to
light again.
Every interior of
every complex,
every facility,
every day
of every year
industrial green.
Now and then, when he steels himself
to look down, breaking
with intricate traditions, crossing
all sorts of self-imposed regulations,
he sees the corduroy slippers on his pale, puffy feet
and is inescapably shocked
by brown.
Award winning poet/author Patricia Gomes has been published in countless literary journals and anthologies, both in print and electronically. Author of four chapbooks, she performs her work extensively throughout the New England area in addition to running poetry workshop and hosting poetry venues.
The former editor of Adagio Verse Quarterly, she earned a 2007 Pushcart nomination for her poem, One Man's Claret. In addition to the United States, Ms. Gomes' work has been published in the UK, Australia, Canada, and India.
Currently, she is the on-line poetry moderator of iVillage's Poets Workshop, a division of NBC. She is a co-founder of the GNB Writers' Block, an active member of the Bartley Scrivener Poetry Group, the Massachusetts State Poetry Society and the New England Horror Writers Association.
del.icio.us
