recipes for hemlock

Excited to have a poem of mine in the first anthology by Boston Poetry Magazine.  Editor Mike Jewett did an excellent job putting this together.  Click image to get your copy and check out some poetry from the dVerse community as well as the talented voices of some others included in this anthology.

Wrestling with Goodbye

At all the wrong turns

and times, and for the wrong reasons,

we vowed love

through false teeth.

You were looking for a mother

I could never be, an anesthetic

for your terminal sicknesses.

And I was hiding who I was meant to be,

afraid of myself.

I am sorry for the mask

and how long it wore me.

Still, I am not sure if you are as fatally sorry

for this headstone you’ve saddled me with.

No matter—

a dew dropped, more dark than red, rose

waits on the doorstep.

Take it,

I can live with your ghost no longer.

Plus, I’m learning what it’s like to be me    

without you

and how,

finally,

to like her.

© 2013 Jennifer Wagner

For the prompts at Poetry Jam:  Battles and Poets United:  Just Past Center

*A poem of mine was selected for the dVerse 2^nd Anniversary Contest at Boston Poetry Magazine.  I’m thrilled to have had my piece be chosen.  Click here to check it out and read the poems of others who placed in the contest.  Thank you to all the judges and congrats to all the winners!  Great writing, all.

The Carbon Dioxide (of Poetry)

when all the shapes of dreams

flew by outside your window

and you couldn’t catch one

to call your own,

when every

gnarly, blighted

branch of life’s undoing

rotted right up through your soles,

those pieces of poems called out,

laying dormant in blades of nevermind grass,

for you to crawl

across the grit of unholy floors,

to find grace through

time-smudged glass

and see them

beneath the soil, coiled

and waiting for you

to breathe them into birth

 

Copyright © 2013 Jennifer Wagner

 

A sort of tribute to poetry itself, as it is National Poetry Month, and how poets are given poetry and with it the ability to turn pain into art.

for dVerse OpenLinkNight