Welcome to Toad’s Blog Forum. Here’s where you’ll contribute to our issue-ly blog. If we love your response, we’ll ask you to send more for publication in our next issue.
This issue we’re featuring a little poem we loved. Imitate or take it to a separate dimension. Be brave and spontaneous, or come back with tactics.
We will post your poem, essay, painting, song, anything, so long as it is creative, and talks to the works at hand.
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Michael Mlekoday
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH POLLINATION
I will make something of you both juniper
and ipecac. A month of night.
Something that sings like a housefly
moments before the palm,
that cracks like a bottle or window
in winter. Although it is the oldest invention,
the first time you built a fire
is something to remember.
The other times, less so.
Tonight I didn’t kill anything.
Tomorrow I will
sell flowers by the pound,
the neighbors will smash them
into their noses and close their eyes.
Tonight I didn’t kill anything. I painted
the dresser with pensive sky
a coat of red. Resolve. Everyone
always leaves and leaves return. Dance
lazy circles in vanished squares.
And for a month the relative position
between point a and point b goes un-
broken. But that’s a lie. There’s a crinkled
strategy sapping the lines in my palm.
Life line, headlines, heart mines, luck.
Tomorrow I will occupy a vacant lot
and sell noble trees for twenty-five
minutes. I will search for the shy, not
quite prettiest of the bunch to display
her in a window. Needles barely
touching glass barely touching. Cons
against the firs. The first time these two
arms touch.
Self-Portrait with Nothing
He hangs a zero around his neck
like it’s the moon or the place
in the sky where the moon used to go.
The first time he masturbated
his stomach filled with bubbles
and God watched until the water
turned cold. There were apple trees
out behind the trailer guarded
by hornets and the fragrant scent
of teenage sweat.
At night a ghost drug its feet
up and down the hall, or maybe
he dreamed that, like the time
he thought God put his finger
in the center of his brain,
and flipped the switch for caring.