"Lines Hallucinating Stoned Ladders Walking in Circles" and "Ladies Night at Cafe Trauma"
Lines Hallucinating Like Stoned Ladders Walking in Circles
I like tokens of despair,
IV shuddering in shadowed air
VI my mum’s birth in white |
VII afternoons of insect moons
IX idling on brindled stairs
X of crystalline gravity |
Ladies’ Night at Café Trauma
Lines wandered, wondering
where heading, where, and
whether, hallucinating world
or world hallucinating line,
them, old decade, old song
wandering lost in head,
in word, in name, last loss,
loss no found to find,
folded in felt lost, and lost are,
a silent, a scar, no sound of is.
Begin again the broken
mansion sons of man, sons
of again a gain the lost best
minds of lost wandering the
midnight, no, 2 am, sweats
of borrowed streets of silent
daughters voyaging toward
homes filled with dust and
detritus and grime lacking
wind eyes to air their there.
Martha Jackson Kaplan is a Pushcart nominated poet and flash fiction writer who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She has a passion for history, a sense of place, and language itself. She has published both in print and online and has won awards from Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. You can find her flash fiction at Bending Genres II, an essay in Bramble V (online and in print), and is thrilled to be published again with Unlikely Stories Mark V. More about her can be found at MarthaKaplanPoet.com.