Tag: lost

Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

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Window Strike at Highlands Behavioral Health

While we were talking about death, bullet-like,
a crow struck the floor-to-ceiling window and landed
on his back two stories below. I checked on him
during a patio break. He was still alive. I placed him
in a shrub. He grabbed a branch with his talons
but flipped upside down when I let his body go.
He was too cold, his nictitating membranes
clouding his eyes as he lay on the shrub’s moat
of dank mulch. I rolled him onto his stomach
so he could breathe, but he flipped on his back
again and again. Is he dead, the patients asked,
most of them young men who were certain
everything was an omen. They lived from sign
to sign, deciphering what things really meant,
the secrets speaking all around them. I think
he’s dying, I said. There’s nothing we can do.
At our next patio break, the crow was gone.
What does that mean, the patients asked me.
I wanted to believe what I told them. The crow
was just stunned and needed time to fly away.
But I think a staff member went around the side
of the building and tossed the bird, alive or dead,
into a bag and then into the trash, a truth I could
barely confront, my mind lashed by sadness
and fear. Maybe that bird was a sign, an omen.
Maybe we were all the bird and the staff member
was the entire staff and the bag was our cure
and the trashcan was the hospital and we were
either alive or dead, all us patients and maybe
the nurses and techs, too. It was impossible
to confront that they were in our world like that
or that we were in their world like this, that we
were each other’s worlds. Our faces in their eyes,
theirs in ours appear. Bird gone to glass. Bird gone
to ground. Bird gone to trash. Patient gone to knees.
Patient gone to floor. Patient gone to needle. How
could I say that? I had to say, The crow survived.

*

Lost

The town I live in became a fun-house
version of itself when I slipped into psychosis
two summers ago. Or was it fall? Seasons turned
inside out, and time, and place. People I knew
looked like each other. The men like my father.
The women like my mother. I walked down streets
in the dark waiting for the LDS version of God
to take me or send me to perdition with his sons.
His call. He did neither. Every road ended in a field
or a turnabout, rows of cows or dark houses.
I was missing the signs, the ones I needed to see
in this rural puzzle game of piety. I called the police.
Maybe they’d book me for not being wanted, even
by God. Surely, that was a capital offense. They said
to go home, where I didn’t belong. I needed to be
forgiven once and for all or punished for eternity
for being his daughter. For being of him. For being his.
Heavenly father, on behalf of my father, wipe me off
this map, wrap me in your gown, lift me from this bed
and burn me until I’m clean or extinguish me before
I manage to burn down this whole damn town.

*

Bonnet About a Demurring Theme, I Mean

sonnet about a recurring dream, no world
outside this restroom with its busted squalls and
leashing skinks, I mean rusted stalls and leaking
sinks, a mingled blight nickering of love, I mean
single light flickering above. Unkind
prayers aren’t even falls, I mean sometimes there aren’t
even stalls, just one wrong stash in the drawer, I mean
one long gash in the floor. Or the best groom has no
whore. I mean the restroom has no door. There’s
never any wrath issued, I mean there’s
never any bath tissue, and I want to
clot over the stench, I mean squat over the
trench, but my eggs are breaking, I mean my legs are
shaking like I’m awake, I mean like I am a wake.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).

Lost by Ashley Kirkland

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Lost

I’ve lost my mother many times, enough
to fill a lifetime. She is always slipping away
from me. The first time (a classic) in a 90’s turn of events

in a department store, I pressed my face to soft silk shirts
& got lost in a rack of clothing. A woman found me crying
in the center of the circular rack. Years later, we nearly lost

her when her heart blew open in the living room,
her aorta fraying like the end of a rope. The ghost I was floated
across campus for weeks. A teacher called me honey

and I nearly cried: nearly motherless at 21. Now, 36,
my husband and I talk in the kitchen on a Sunday
afternoon, rain drizzling in late November, football helmets

clashing on the tv in the other room, and we talk about her
health as if it concerns us and I say he’ll be devastated,
referring to our older son, who loves my mother. She doesn’t realize

I say who she’s hurting by not taking care of herself as if her health
is something within our control. I was 21 & I said goodbye to her
over the phone and drove home while she was in surgery,

her chest splayed open on the operating table, her aorta
a patchwork. Now, 36, I stop and listen every time I hear sirens
to see if they turn in the direction of her street. I lose her again

and again, dread the day when I get the call (again),
when my father tells me to come home now, and I have to tell
my son, in words I don’t yet know, what has happened.

*

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.

Lost by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Lost
        post-election, 2024

This is where I live now: clutching
a nest of thorns and spent blooms.

Last night, an intruder opened every
window of my home to startling cold.

No wood for fire. No socks or coat.
My closets hold spring dresses, thin

cotton, paltry, owned by another woman.
In this strange country, I search empty

rooms for blankets, matches, candles,
an exile, holding dead flowers. Even

their broken bits I pick up, to clasp
what’s fallen, cradling what’s gone.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. Say hello through her website or connect through her newsletter, Poetry Inspired.

Lost by Allison Thung

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Lost

I

Find my hand
in a crowd like
cold, running water
finds a paper cut
so minute it is
unfelt until
unforgotten.

II

If every over-
shoulder glance
only furthers
and shrinks you,
then the only
way to keep you
close and larger
than life is to
never look back;
only inward.

III

My fingertips
yellow in cold
or under stress.
The doctor
agrees it’s likely
Raynaud’s. The
doctor will not
agree it’s also
my grip
on the past.

IV

After a bout
in the sun,
your face is a
constellation,
every now-
distinct mole
and freckle
guiding me
home to
safety.

*

Allison Thung is a Singaporean poet and project manager. She is the author of Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) and the forthcoming Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified ‘you’ (Hem Press, 2025). Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Cease, Cows, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Allison reads poetry for ANMLY. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison, or at www.allisonthung.com.

Two Poems by Barn Brand

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Lost
I find myself sitting at a hard used grimy kitchen table with a green and white checkered tablecloth that leaves half the table exposed
The table is surrounded by four chairs, three clearly are set mates to the table sharing a four leaf clover design carved into their upright, the fourth, the one I’m sitting on, looks more like a junk store giveaway, its ripped green vinyl seat cushion pox marked with cigarette burns
I don’t know this place
I don’t know why I am here or what is expected of me
I’m not sure I know exactly who I am
My name is on the tip of my tongue, it just won’t let me spit it out
I keep trying but it refuses to budge
I’m afraid I will swallow it
And lose my name forever
I’d like to go home, but I really don’t know what that means
I’m scared, no I’m frightened, no I’m terrified
*
Mud
Bob said he did not come from dust
Of this he was certain
His life was too difficult to trace back to dust
Dust floats in the lightest sweet breath of the wind
Dust can leave the gravity of pain and witness the cosmos reborn
No, Bob was the descendant of mud, thick deep wet, boot sucking mud
Add a little lightning
Add a little DNA
Add a halfway decent sculptor
and you got Bob
When Bob passed away, my broken heart and Bob’s ashes waited for a thunderstorm
After the ground was soaked and puddling, I took the tractor out beyond the farm line and poured Bob into a mud filled trench and ground him in with my work boots. It was a slow process, every time I raised my leg, I was at war with the mud that wanted to pull me down to join Bob
I waited there for lightning, used Bob’s Bowie knife to draw blood from my wedding ring finger, watched my DNA join Bob and his mud and prayed that he would come back to me
But the mix was not right
I turned back to the farmhouse that Bob built by hand during the first 3 years that we farmed, and started the journey of living with my memories
*
Bronx born and raised Barn Brand, age 77, has been writing poetry since the age of 12. He feels that his words have now come of age and are ready to be read. Barn is a member of the poetry circles of West Milford, N.J. and Yuma, AZ. – the two communities where he lives his life. When not reading or writing or gardening Barn pedals down the road averaging 4,500 miles each year. His work has appeared on The Recovering Self, and in the MasterLink. His work will also appear later this year in the Paterson Literary Review.
*
Author’s Note:
To me, the writing of poetry is an attempt to bridge a feeling from one mind to another – sometimes we transfer intense emotions that attach to the reader’s core, sometimes what we offer is more lightly felt, but always it is the emotion rather than the story that is paramount.
Grief, lust, depression, love, hate, forgiveness, reverence, humor, and harmony – our emotional history, how we integrate it and how we share it makes us who we are – and that is why poetry matters.

Lost and Found by Diane Averill

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Lost and Found

In the woods one day
the child me
found a black butterfly pendant
on a nurselog
covered with neon moss.

It had slipped from its chain
that in the soft rain
might have become a garter snake,
gone to ground.

I held metamorphosis in my palm
where it warmed, sending dark light
through gently closed fingers
clear into my veins.

There was no other girl in sight.
I remember not
looking too hard for her.

Charmed, I took it home,
then from place to place, moving
through adulthood.
It lives still in my jewelry box
and when I lift it from its resting place
its orange eyes look at me from far away.

Even after six decades
there is something curled in the antenna
of the girl who was once possessed by it

and I wonder if she remembers
what part of her child self
she lost that day.

*

Diane Averill is the author of Branches Doubled Over With Fruit (University of Florida Press) and Beautiful Obstacles (Blue Light Press), and Among Pearls Hatching (Dancing Moon Press). She has published in many anthologies and literary magazines including Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Tar River Poetry, and The Carnegie Mellon-Anthology of Poetry. Her most recent poems can be found in Mom Egg Review and January Review. She taught English and poetry writing workshops at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City until retirement.