...to watch the weeds fold

one day
i shall collect all my poems
for the winter of my years
and lock them in a mahogany chest,
low before my bed and moth-covered.

and maybe
one day, while picking lonely
dandelions on a mud-washed
and sinking road, you'll find the key,
golden and splintered beneath layers
of ash and pumice.

perhaps
there will you find me
with mars and pompeii,
brooding, sighing,
and writing of winter.

like catching butterflies

it's like catching butterflies
on my tongue�

(watching as they swirl on soft drafts
with indigo wings royally swaying in slow motion
and gentle legs delicately combing my mother's red poppies)

�i sometimes forget that i'm actually
kissing you.

soup days

mother's soup tastes
like sunshine today: warm,
creamy sun-drops, blinking
like beads of glass
in a lightning
storm.

yet it smells of maritime:
with noises of clown
fish hiding among
the poison,
peppered rice

and spice black
enough to bend
back the spoon.
she calls it gumbo,

but somewhere under the brine
of crab claws and jumbo shrimp,
i know there's pea soup: dried
and cooked and yellowed
like the restless fog
i inhale each
morning.

 

   

   

                                                                                                © Rickey McGhee

Loch Raven Review Winter 2005 — Vol. I, No. 2
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