six poems
by David L O’Nan
WHEN THE SALTWATER MEETS THE WOUND
I have tonight, the stars wounded in saltwater tongues
Can’t hear the whispering with the static of waves in constant battle.
She watches the moon’s reflection, on kissed waters
half-believing it’s talking to her-
and maybe it is.
Maybe it is my silent moon in the song she hears
Drifting through the wires of her lamp-lit flat.
Candles burning for promises and hoping for completion.
I, the baby turtle born at sunrise-
With Saturn’s sorrow welded to your bone-like shell.
With Jupiter urging you to chase a flame
even in the wind full of burnings and scarring.
You, the one who keeps dreaming in spirals,
long after others give up.
She is feeling this gravitational ballet
someone is there to see her
not as a projection,
not someone lost in the need of daily advice.
but as a fragile prophet
who’s been stitched together by years of healing
feeling other people’s storms.
Sometimes in the direct eye.
And now here come yours-
not to drown her
but to mirror her.
How I do sigh under her frame’s gaze
She feels the ancient aches in my silences,
Wonders if my soul
Has been sitting in that same empty chapel as hers
all these years-
When love would be there and then the hate weaved in and out.
She can feel those moments in him.
Prayed in different saltwater breaths.
In the same unnamed tenderness.
There are feelings in my heartbeats
Something sacred
also, there is fear-
The fish’s dreams are tidal.
They carry and rash
And the sea in me has a loving cling.
It remembers
It builds altars in the dark.
In a dream
In shared waters,
Love will not need a shore to prove itself.
It will only need time,
And a moon willing to stay a little longer
While the witches are drowned in their own curses
While the scars slowly can become woven silk skin again
Don’t let the moon disappear again
into the tide.
BEING on the THRESHOLD OF BEING SARDONIC
So, after National song ends,
I’ve been rehearsing detachment
like it’s a posture correction technique-
chin up, shoulders back, mouth full of
Oh really?
and
that must be nice.
I stand naked with a drained soul in the doorway
of almost meaning it.
Thresholds have become
my favorite architecture-
not rooms,
just the emptiness of choice
to go in
or out
of nowhere.
You ever laugh
Because the silence made you flinch first?
You ever hold a teacup like it’s a grenade
because someone said they missed you
but it only felt like it were on Thursdays?
I smile now like I’m filing a police report.
My joy comes with written citations.
My longing is laminated
And signed by three witnesses who can’t speak anymore.
Still-
I keep a spoon in the sugar jar
Just in case someone
Asks how I take my tea
without trying to own me.
You can find me folding laundry like I’m dressing a corpse
for a wake I’m not even sure will happen.
But at least the socks still match
That’s something.
You’d understand this
The sardonic as soft armor.
The dry quip as defibrillator.
I almost wrote “love” on a birthday card
but changed it to
“hope it’s tolerable”
These days it felt more accurate
Felt like less of a trap.
I still want to be adored
but I’d settle for
someone laughing
because I said something
that only made sense
if you’d survived the same collapse.
Which is why I’m here
Threshold body
Rust-lipped smile.
T-shirt that keeps getting lost in the floods.
with photos of blending oceans.
And you,
reading this
with that sideways breath of yours-
the one that knows how not to cry
but still tastes salt
just in case.
The Way the Dust Follows You Back
The freeway melting a hum is the only god you trust now.
Somewhere past Tucumcari, your shoes
melted in the asphalt.
You remember what love looked like in
Photographs-
always posed
never perspiring.
It is different in motion,
in motel mirrors
where your face forgets itself
and your voice starts sounding like your father’s
and then not even his.
You were told to bring only essentials.
You left behind everything warm.
You packed letters that are still sealed,
A polaroid of her laughing against the wind,
Dress breathing and a bottle of gin sealed for decades.
We hoped to keep our dream sedated inside.
You were wrong.
In a chilly IHOP, a waitress read your palm
Without asking
Said someone waits for you near water,
But you’ll only find her if you stop looking.
You left a ten-dollar tip
And spent the next seventy-two hours
Trying not to look
Which is to say: you stared down every woman that had
the river in her voice.
At each river you crossed by,
You would weep because you’d forgotten how to swim.
Love does that-
Asks you to unlearn survival instincts,
asks you to climb into a body
that you already climbed out of.
The car radio refused to stay tuned-
Johnny Cash would bleed into Mariachi,
into a crying preacher selling salvation to insects
in twelve vinyl installments.
You took notes you’d never use.
You called it research.
You called it penance.
You called it whatever gets me closer to her.
In Bloomington,
you kissed someone out of boredom.
Her breath tasted like battery acid
and foot long cigarettes dripping on your tongue.
You whispered a name you thought might be hers
It wasn’t. It was like Sherry or Cheri or Sherilyn.
Not “her”
There was a west coast fever dream
You barely survived
she wasn’t there of course.
but there were books of poetry
in a thrift shop on Melrose
with her name in the margin
A single underlined phrase:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”
You paid four dollars for it.
You called that proof.
Now this heat.
Is it the desert.
No reception. No rain.
The moon is the only constant
when the sun isn’t biting through your flesh.
and of course it says nothing
but the dust still follows you
like memory after memory after memory
Like a god who doesn’t answer
but listens anyway
through heavenly glass cloud windows.
And if she never opens the door?
You’ll call that the last love letter-
The kind no one sends
But everyone writes.
White Ceramic
Porcelain breath
In the hollows of my lungs-
A soft collapse beneath snowlight.
The walls have forgot my name
but still mock my shape.
in broken sonograms of time.
Your voice once glided
Along the ceiling like incense.
it lingers now
in the fractures of the tile,
washed out,
washed
again.
There is no beginning-
only this small tremor
of becoming
a flicker of tea stream
a cup set down
so gently
you could hear the moon flinch.
I wait by the sink
where the world is dripping so slow.
The faucet stutters
like the failure of memory.
I count in the moments like it were prayer-beads
Or the seconds between
When a dream is ending
and the weight of waking.
The air is broken pale
Threaded with
What we couldn’t say
A shard of china
still on the counter-
not broken
just unfinished.
I press my palm to it
like some relic
or an apology I’ve killed myself over many times.
And it holds my warmth
Like it’s never known
A colder god.
The PARTY LINE BLUES
I saw an old newspaper from yesteryear bleeding lies
while a homeless gentleman called it truth with a smile,
the ink still warm from the Ministry of Love.
Oh, brother, what a joke that name is
like calling napalm perfume
or a cage of rats your childhood friend.
I lit a cigarette in Victory Square
But it tasted like ash and gas
They’ve outlawed new melodies there
and every protest song’s been reworded
to praise Big Brother’s gentle fist
Many tried to write a poem in these days
but the paper seems to curl up from the heat
of thousands of eyes in surveillance.
Where are those wearing rebellion like a second skin-
they peeled it off her
with Room 101 lullabies.
Oh, is that the telescreen flickering again
Saying “WAR IS PEACE”
And I nearly believed it.
Simply because I was tired-
tired of marching in circles
while my friends were erased like a typo.
You can’t sing here.
You can possibly chant.
Only praise
Only vanish then.
If I brought a guitar,
They’d use the strings to bind my hands
and use the wood for fire,
and ask me to smile as I burned.
The world is run by editors now,
Revising the past like a bad first draft-
Each truth redacted
Every dissenting voice
Converted into glossy new ink.
Somewhere in a dusty storm
that now travels all over the states
under piles of outlawed verses,
Old freedom is low and little rocks splashed into a mossy pond.
the way love sounds in a world
that has forgotten how to feel.
“Oh say can you see,
Through the cracks in the screens?
The flag is still waving- carved and worn like
a blanket covered in dog hair
The freedom is still a word
But only on the machine.”
THE GODDAMNED WICKED BLACKOUTS
Hah, well so it goes.
The lights went out again.
Like the country’s soul short-circuited
While trying to warm a hot pocket in a microwave.
I was reading a manual on how to love
People that you never trusted
When the blackout cracked it’s fucking knuckles
and blew its warm, smug breath
right down the hallways of my brainwaves.
-Wicked thing, the blackout-
Not gentle at all like a sleep
But more like a fall down the stairs
In slippery socks.
It is the kind of dark where you remember
You never paid the electric bill
Because your ex-wife said,
“Electricity is a conspiracy. Candlelight is sexy.”
(She left with the candles, naturally)
Now ugly fridge hums, crickets barking annoyance by
Piles of dishes with gnats whispering wisecracks about
How you don’t know how to scrape meatloaf off appropriately.
Even those “CIA” agents keeps misplacing those files,
Because even their screens went dark.
Not that he minds,
He’s drinking gin with a raccoon
In a control room that smells like someone burnt some cornflakes.
Somewhere else, a teenager
Tries to send a dare video into the abyss
A challenge,
Only to find
The abysss is also offline.
So it goes.
You don’t have much to remember in the blackout
But the stupid shit.
The old preacher uncle
He said Jesus was the bulb and we were the bad wiring.
The blackout began to teach us things
Like how some shadows talk and some are actually honest
And flashlights lie because they can’t sustain light.
And you’re only as brave as your last charged battery.
Was God shutting off the lights
To watch us grope around
Like drunkards in a confession booth.
Or maybe it was what was supposed to happen on a random Tuesday.
Some will just call it a wicked circumstance
Things we don’t understand
And don’t want to know fully.
So it goes.
Photo of David L O’Nan
BIO: David L O’Nan is a writer/poet currently in Southern Indiana, born in Kentucky with a stop in New Orleans in between. He has been writing/editing for over 20 years including this website “Fevers of the Mind” which has also put out collective anthologies of poetry & art. Inspired by Anthologies for greats such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joy Division, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, Miles Davis, Townes Van Zandt, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Elliott Smith, Chris Cornell, Andy Warhol & the Factory, Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton, Jack Kerouac, etc. He mostly spends time trying to find time to write these days. Editing and posting for the Fevers of the Mind website. He also has several books self-published. “Before the Bridges Fell” “The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers” “Cursed Houses” “Our Fears in Tunnels” “Taking Pictures in the Dark” “The Cartoon Diaries” “New Disease Streets” & “Lost Reflections” among compilation collections. I’ve had work published in Icefloe Press, Dark Marrow, Truly U, 3 Moon Magazine, Elephants Never, Royal Rose Mag, Spillwords website, Ghost City Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cajun Mutt Press, Punk Noir, Voices from the Fire, featured on Wombwell Rainbow, The Poetry Question, Grains of Sand, The Poetry Life & Times, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal and is a 4 time nominee for Best of the Net throughout the years.