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Unpolished Ink Sep 2023
Scarlet dancing poppies
ruffled skirts flung high
pansies and geraniums
nod to an August sky
foxglove mint and rosemary
move with the wind and sway
a summer garden party
and a fragrant cabaret
David Hilburn Jun 2023
Both of my many
Seriously, the thanks
Of oddity, set to language
With a single hope, to simply ask...

Silence, I can afford
With only, itself...
Cause curious, the offending word
Is love, with an instinct for wealth

Paradise, was a fascinated clue
Almost and authority, undue?
Shared with poises shadow
Claiming only myself, as voice accrued

See...
Being the fate of another
Time, is a world, before anarchy
Ought in my step's, divine is a lover...
What if a scarecrow could ask you, if I spy it in the land and it should...
Anais Vionet Aug 2022
Our coffeemaker died this morning - it wouldn’t **** all the water out of the reservoir - c'est tragique. We love our coffee and apparently, we brewed the life out of it. It sat, oddly neglected, in its usually busy spot beneath hanging copper pans. Adieu, faithful friend, you gave your life to a good cause. We’re reduced to using a freeze-dried brew.

Lisa grew up in New York highrises, and she was agog in our garden. “It’s like Versailles!” she whispered, when we first arrived and did the tour - flattering but hardly. It’s a six acre, French, Color Garden. An acre is like a football field without the end zones - so maybe you can picture the size of it as it wraps around the front of the house.

The lawn slopes off gently to circular beds and right-angled parterres. Two staircases lead to a fountain that feeds a rectangular reflecting pool full of lily-pads and lazy goldfish. Lisa and Leong spent hours this summer reading in the only cool spot, a shaded, wisteria-covered pergola, but gardens are best in fall and spring - when in bloom. I’m sorry they didn’t get to see the explosive flowerings - maybe we can come back, someday, for Easter vacation.

We’re leaving for New Haven at the end of the week so I’m slow organizing for academic life. I have 21 new notebooks (three per class or lab) and 60 various, carefully coutured, colored markers and gel-pens. I tried taking notes on my iPad last year but I found I remembered things better when I took colorful notes by hand, highlighting ideas, and pinning them down in my notebooks, like butterflies.

We hung out with a lot of rising college freshman girls this summer and across the board, it’s been fun. Their questions were super random, but super aware - their interests make our bumbling, freshie experiences seem buzzy. I remember being so ground-down the carceral, COVID lockdown of my 10th and 11th-grade years that college freedoms seemed like space travel. I’m excited for these girls.

Peter and I are squeezing in a morning Facetime call. He looked a little tousled and undone, sporting a black, almost blue, bedhead mess of morning hair. With his sleepy, brown eyes and five o’clock shadow, he looked like he just fell out of bed after hours of.. ahem. My usual, unfocused feelings seemed to find a compelling point.

I smiled and sipped my coffee, “What?” he said, self-consciously, upon catching my expression.

“I just can’t wait to see you in person.” I demurred, choosing to focus on this morning’s awful, instant coffee. I tend to chatter when I’m excited by something, but maybe I’m learning the power of silence.
BLT Marriam Webster word of the day challenge: Carceral: suggesting a jail or prison.
Dahlia May 2022
there's something about you
that buries itself in my chest
growing its roots somewhere deep inside
blooming and blossoming
reaching and tangling around my veins
wrapping its vines around my bones
spreading its pollen through my bloodstream with every gentle heartbeat
seeping through my fingers and toes
crawling up my spine and flowering in my thoughts
I carry you everywhere
and as I fall asleep at night,
I think about the way it feels
to have you next to me
I've been friends with you for what feels like forever. I wish I could tell you how I really feel, but I'm scared I'm going to ruin what we have.
AE Aug 2021
We swim in pools of flowers picked from the gardens
Grown from your words
Going back and forth between poetic sonnets
And bare laughs
Feeling pain in our ribs
Healing the pain in our hearts
I try to write sentences too cluttered to make sense of
With metaphors, like gardens
So that you may not accidentally figure out
Everything you mean to me

So that you and I can spend a lifetime together
Picking words apart
Searching for meaning and walking with the stars
Because these midnight conversations
Are too precious to be lost to effortless deciphering
Shofi Ahmed Jun 2021
The Babylonian hanging gardens is vanished
                            maybe the fairies tucked it away.
Lo the clouds swim on your dry leaves, rainfalls
                                                        hum on the way!
Unpolished Ink Jun 2021
I won’t cry
well not for too long
perhaps just now and again a tear will fall
you worked hard all of your life
now the work is done
you can rest up a bit
although you will fit it hard to sit still
you always did
perhaps you are a butterfly or a bee
busily checking on your garden
I think you would like that
happy among the flowers
you have not gone from our hearts
whenever I see a garden in full bloom
I will smile
and you will be with me
I am writing a funeral poem for a gardener!
camps May 2021
going outside nowadays is just a game of
who can hold their breath the longest and of
looking for reasons to pass the time in your
own backyard but the gardens i see are only for
the literary muses haunting writers into submission
and for digging up holes with plastic shovels and
for wishing that i could pick up the daisies
and place them in your hair

i was in the middle of drawing a circle when
my arm quivered and now the line shoots
way past the paper and it's currently
undulating over my desk and zooming past
a caterpillar that's contemplating whether the
process of becoming beautiful would actually
make him beautiful when he already knows
that he is beautiful

i hope the god i pray to forgives me for
making all the lines i write be about you
this poem makes me picture a certain someone
title inspired by a certain somewhere

from my new book anywhere but here
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