Drea Kato

Dream Disease

You be the building and I’ll be the fire.
She’ll be the one on the funeral pyre.

All night and day I will dance around you
and climb you, as I try to escape these

twirling images.  At the moment I no longer
want to deal with these words that drip

like blood, each one a little city etched
with a smoky memory or two of something

mildly to severely traumatic.  Sometimes I
just don’t want to wake up to a face, I want

to wake up to birds chirping and being blown up
by shotguns and songs about big black rivers, a

paisley haze.  Every day I grow more tired of
your tiredness, of your wavering abjection, of

the way you and your country try to suppress it all
with drugs, staving off dreams like they are disease.

 

Snowy Hell

Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers
and could not climb out for a while
because the stems kept breaking
and the petals started rotting
and I got sick from the smell.

Later I woke up on a cold California
beach, dragged out by someone who cleaned
me up with bleach, dragged out by someone
who had arms enough to reach into my
jagged heart that’s space deep.

Here I am I guess, people tell me I’m pretty
but I suffer from an ugly private paralysis.
Here I am I guess.  Please give me your best.

Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers,
I started playing solitaire, got distracted
for hours.  And then the stems kept breaking
and the flowers started rotting and I got sick
from the smell, and then I woke up on a beach;

someone had dragged me out of that snowy hell.

 

 

Drea Jane Kato was born in the great state of California and was raised Buddhist by a gypsy-like artist mother and a Japanese farmer who currently grows pineapples in Hawaii. She is a Capricorn, Dragon, INTJ, HSP, Atheist, singer/songwriter, abstract painter/artist, iPhone photographer who likes yoga, fasting, and the beach. She has been published in magazines such as The Blue Jew Yorker, My Favorite Bullet, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Beat, Ditch, Pomegranate, ReadThis Magazine, Otis Nebula, and Alternativereel.

Blogger-Chick

by Danny Earl Simmons

 

Her words slide

across the page

like a lap dance

and grind against

the very base of you.

She writes

like a runaway

without options;

uses what God gave

and what men take.

She digs on the sweat

and the panting

and the smoke

and the rush of blood

to the head

from the whiskey

she pours down your throat,

and you open wide.

She knows

she’s an addiction

and winks

at the weakness

of you,

reduces you to words

you read over

and over again.

 

 

Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He has loved living in the Mid-Willamette Valley for over 30 years. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and pops in when his work schedule allows. He works for Knife River and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Albany Civic Theater.

Lumbricus terrestris

Below the snow-pack, under the flat tangle

of matted grass, gently squirming beneath

the force-field of the frost line

live les vers de terre, their cryptic trails

umbilically twisting toward the winter crust.

I’d like to think that it’s summer Down Under,

Worms on holiday from noxious flocks

and the deadly tread of feet.

 

And when Spring, sensed like a womb-heard

heartbeat, melts the inhibitions and ignites

the slick ambitions of The Few, The Strong,

The Rebel-Worms, to take a slide on the wild side,

up, where the world is dry and frightful;

will I find their wriggling courage to say

to the flowers and the giants,

“Eat my dust!”?

 
 

Constance Kramer is a microbiologist by training, but explores the visible and invisible world with poetry and short fiction, also. She resides in Tallmadge, OH.

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