at first it feels like summer camp in september, you will be back soon, but days become weeks, become more than a month & you aren’t home
at night, sometimes i think i hear your late arrival, as if you were still a high school senior, i thought those saturday nights would go on forever, they don’t, they can’t, time waits for no one, certainly not for some middle-aged man
sad in still moments, memory is love
you the dancer, the big sister, the teacher, the basketball player, the driver, the instagram addict, the celsius drinker, the friend to many
& so i just stare at this screen & wait for thanksgiving.
Tag: Sadness
Alone in Winnipeg
how odd that I am here in october, scarred
scraped streets, waiting for the return of snow, searching for eleanor, a name, my mother, the one who let me go, adopted, how many times have i said the word? euphemism for unwanted, union of man & woman, for a minute? an hour? a lifetime? questions for canada, where she danced before moving to the u.s. to birth me-
alone in the archives, sifting through microfiche, obituaries, royal winnipeg ballet documents, playbills, eleanor christie, just a name, everything & nothing-
at night i dine on foie gras at resto gare in saint-boniface, flickering french lights, wine’s floating ether, who was she? who am i?-
shiver of winter air’s arrival, i tried, but you are gone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This piece is poetic fiction. I am not adopted.
Of Mice and Grease
tell me more, tell me more, the musical didn’t get very far, first act, april, 1988, and i’m a freshman in high school, managed to avoid the senior crazies all year, the guys who threw all the parties, got into all the fights, the ones teachers feared, they are close to graduating, but not without one final senior prank, and this is where i come in, me and hundreds of other students watching grease, i don’t see the eight guys in the darkened auditorium, each with a sack of 50 mice, all 400 bought over several days before, details that come out later, the crazies release the rodents while danny zuko is crooning summer fling, don’t mean a thing, then that high pitch animal squeak screeches out from under every seat, an unnatural infestation, the screams begin, kids jump on seats, some run for the aisle, pure chaos, like the barf-o-rama scene in stand by me, i walk quickly to the exit, when i see slow-footed chris hagan, all 260-pounds of him laboring to get out too, i didn’t see the body of the crushed mouse under his reebok high tops, just splashes of scarlet blood splattered on his sneaker, for a second i lock eyes with chris, he’s visibly shaking, his jowls quivering, probably had never killed anything before in his life, a minute later i’m out of the theater, suddenly sad on a warm spring day.
Before & Now
i could try to put
all the words back together
months and years of poems
those fragments, pieces of bone
structure of love, my body
of work, endless expression
of our boundless truth
when we were both
younger, before
but now
only this
Moody Blues & An Old Flame
i wonder where you are, i wonder if you think about me, once upon a time in your wildest dreams, moody blues 1986, he sent her the song on a cassette in the mail, like a message in a bottle, old & scraped, washed up, on her shore, no one listens to the moody blues anymore, she replied on a postcard, but thanks, 10 years had passed, he never wrote her again
The Old House: 1978-2023
this is the place
where i once lived
basement tv, saturday sugar
cereal, endless ping pong
mowing the lawn and
shooting driveway basketball hoops
sledding as a child
reading by the fireplace
blasting the beasties upstairs
on the old stereo
ice cream birthday cakes
hide and go seek
learning how to shave
and juggle bean bags
talent shows with sunglasses
and the elvis moves
staring at jumping squirrels
outside my bedroom window
a home once ours
now is no more
COVID-19 Passes The Vietnam War
and when the virus
constricted air from over
58,220 lungs, no one
came to the door
informing us of death’s
arrival, no uniformed soldier’s
solemn words to comfort
ventilator’s failure to save
lives, this war of
no bullets, no answers
to the endless quest
for vaccine’s hopeful solace
we look to blame
those who cannot contain
this invisble reaper, as
if this were one
person’s fault, as if
we could just drop
a nuke and make
it all go away
instead we walk by
black granite names, mourning
the many more, expiring
with each passing day
Cooking Rabbits
many years
ago i
cooked rabbit
really rabbits
for there
were two
that i
cut with
my chef’s
knife to
separate meat
from bone
and while
this happened
i whisphered
i’m sorry
your lives
had meaning
we will
eat all
of you
and we
did, but
i was
still sad
My 9/11/01
the second tower went down
when I was in the car
heard disbelief, NPR like me
unable to stay calm, explaining
the before of white shirts waving for help
specks of humanity jumping out of windows
their hail hit while
I was eating my cereal flakes
at school, televisions on in every room
sirens rushing sound all over screens
the towers falling over and over again
repetition, it happened, it happened
“what does this mean?” I asked my students
as if they knew
“we are going to war,” one said
he wasn’t wrong
I put my classroom flag out in the hall
duct taped it up for all to see
half-staff in my mind
everything in disarray
some TVs stayed on the whole day
kids asked the one teacher from Manhattan
who she knew there
almost excited to hear loss firsthand
like watching people on CNN
holding photos of sisters, mothers, dads
the missing
the forever gone
House Says Goodbye
It is only a house, wood, paint, single pane glass windows,
but ten years pass and it is no longer ours, no longer
that two-story blanket that covered us in our laughter,
held our bare feet on floorboards that knew our family’s
groove, from Gangnam Style to I ain’t your mama, no I
ain’t your mama, not anymore. Sold, our Spanish
American War casa, Victorian era, master bedroom in
the San Francisco fog, where I daydreamed through
tree leaves and power lines, pondered this and that, scribbled,
loved and prayed on dark rainy nights. This place held
us in moments, just moments that always go on to the next,
the goodbye was always waiting, we left and it said hello.
Daniel W. Polk 