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Nat Lipstadt Jul 16
Stumbling into ancient scripts, authored a decades plus ago,
ago being a modifier of time quantities, minute or large, unspecific
without an objective adjective additive, that faucets a stream of an interlocutory elocution of a batter of rooted emotional histories,
but not histrionics

fanciful words for dredged up memories, acute, but tarnished,
powered yet worn by a cousin of ago, a/k/a,
age
and yet
renews as of,

at this very second, as if it were a first, a tumult of visions, swelling of remembrances, embodied scars, and I weep anew but not
for me, as much for the resonating simpatico souls with whom
they even  now vibrate with resonance of the immediacy of
If not now, When?

Aside: The exterior environment is noisy wet pelting of thunderstorms and ****** sheets of bulleting rain, piercing projectiles, but I am safe in the sunroom, sadly happy my dog is no longer here to shiver and tremble, cuddle and be soothed by steady stroking

But I am here, wrestling with this dredging operation, digging up
tons of sand that require dumping, and I ask, inquire, beg:

Who will take this detritus off my hands, once more, now uncovered,
now recovered, the soil is already soaked and can absorb no more,
the soul is already soaked and can absorb no more, the weakened
heart, damaged and occluded, suffer cannot bare twice the

outrageous misfortune

of unbared recollections, twice, or thrice, and I feel myself drowning in revisiting pain, **** **** ****, these old poems, not nuggets, but boulders dropping from night skies, shot from a pitching machine, without letup, piercing of agonies that once ago  
freshly desecrated and decorated my basic training in humanity.

Enough whining:
I wrote those poems to
eject out those pains,
and I write this now, once more,
to realize that so so many still face
uncertain and unrelenting similarities,
doing their own sums,
and I wish them easing,
strength to compose and
thereby dispose of
the ineloquent
and eloquent
words of staining suffering


3:30am
Thur
July 10
2025
APari May 2015
I sit my backpack down on the university bathroom floor with a clink.
I pull my pants down so I blend in to the other collection of feet below the stall walls.
Balancing the large glass bottle between my thighs --
I pick up the unwieldy weight and strangle its neck - I lip it.
I pull in *****, no chaser, like the rappers do.
Throat-clenching cold, metallic liquid,

I try not to retch.
Humming represses the gag reflex.

My best friend asks me why my breath smells like alcohol.
It’s 12:30 on a Tuesday and I’m chewing gum.

I stumble home for miles after a party on the cuff of dark roadway with shooting star cars bulleting by.
I just want my bed.
I violently stick my ***** finger nail down my throat.
I feel much better.

A girl asks me what I was reading at a coffee shop.
I’m too hungover to keep a conversation going.

I fall asleep to the view of a crumbling mountain of beer cans beside my bed.

I take shots before having to make a phone call.

***** looks like water until you shake it.

A nerve pinching, vertebrae crushing chronic back pain sets in.
I drink to numb the pain.

Hidden bottles and cans lay under my my bed in my house back home in Saint Louis.
My dad pulls me aside and timidly tells me I have a weird, dead, look on my face at a family party.

A poem that doesn’t make sense when I read it in the morning.
Haywire words that might have been beautiful.

A google search.
Has anyone died from cirrhosis at the age of 20?

A body-wide rash that was the result of 1.75 liters of ***** over the course of a weekend.
The toxins seep from my pores.

The rest of the lines are whited out.
Carl Velasco Jul 2018
When he moved into the new apartment,
he chose not to open the boxes right away.

Thrilled as he was to find new spots
for old things, he waited until it rained

to see if there would be any leaks on walls.
He waited, and waited, but the rain never came.

Without anything to touch, to play with, to arrange,
he spends days sitting on the wooden chair, the one

caked with paint drips. There, he ponders about the new place,
about when rain would finally come, and he imagines it

sounding like fingers tapping a hollow instrument, or perhaps
pat pat patting like a rabbit hopping toward shelter.

It comes one evening as he sleeps. Droplets
bulleting the tin roof. He does not wake.

In his dream, two men come rushing inside his home:
one slides a gun down his throat. He asks what they want.

The gun-wielding man doesn’t answer. He looks squarely
at him, on his knees nearly choking. The other man

is hauling all his boxes out of the new apartment, leaving
only the dusty outlines where they sat unmoved for months.

Finally, the man slides the gun out his mouth, shakes the spit
off the neck. I’m just new, why me? He asks.

Don’t ask me, I’m just a robber, the man says.
He takes off, slamming the door so hard the hinge breaks.

When he wakes, the rain has stopped. Still in the interim
between dream and real life, he checks if the boxes are still there.

They are. The windowsill is damp.
Outside, under the dim porch light,

he finds tiny puddles on the soles of his sandals.
He strolls lightly before the iron gate, and around him

the faint glow of light from neighboring windows,
the muffled voices of people on TV,

The rare wind who can’t decide
whether to whistle or chime.

Inside, he opens his boxes and fishes out
every hidden thing.

There is a place for each, and while there is something
to be afraid of, it’s not nightmares about thieves.
I deliberately made the pronouns in the robbery passage confusing because I wanted to show they are all thieves.

— The End —