Tag: mindful

Three Poems by Mark Hendrickson

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 2 Comments

Mindful

My therapist says I should light a candle. So I light two, equidistant on the windowsill, four if I count the reflections. It is not enough. I add a stick of incense. She says I should choose calming scents; but lavender and chamomile gag me, so I go with bergamot. I imagine the smoke is steam rising and that life is Earl Grey. The tea grows cold too quickly. Outside my window it’s still raining, also grey. Someone in the apartments across the way is watching me watch them. My therapist says be mindful. I imagine the end of everything.

* 

People Like That

I don’t like people who are too loud. People that don’t pay attention to their surroundings. Angry people who only see the negative side of everything. I despise it when someone is manic one minute and depressed the next. I don’t care for bald people or those who work out all the time and still don’t lose weight. I have no time for intolerant people. I can’t stand introverts or anyone who can’t manage simple small talk without making it awkward. I don’t like people who take pills just to get through the day. No, I don’t like myself at all.

* 

The Leaving

Father drops your hand and shames you into leaving childhood. Voluntarily. ‘Big boys don’t carry security blankets.’ This was never true. Innocence was a home you couldn’t wait to run away from. It remains fashionable to claim you miss it. Then came parents. Friends. Lovers. You left them before they left you. You leave all you were willing to die for. You scream regret to the car in the garage. Soon you will circle round to innocence and childhood again. They will drag you from your home and leave you nowhere. Strangers fail to notice when you leave yourself behind.

*

Mark Hendrickson is a gay poet and former psychiatric nurse living in the Des Moines area. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his work appears in McNeese Review, Vestal Review, Variant Lit, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Follow him @MarkHPoetry or visit markhendricksonpoetry.com

A Mindful Lament by Gloria Heffernan

~ ONE ART: a journal of poetry ~ 1 Comment

A Mindful Lament

They say you can’t get it wrong.
But sometimes meditation
feels like an itchy sweater
on sunburned skin.

I want to peel it off,
free myself from the fibers
that brush and bristle
against the raw places.

Be in the moment, they say.
Feel the discomfort
and let it go.
If this is mindfulness,
let me be mindlessly busy.

Surely there must be a drawer
that needs tidying,
a shelf that needs dusting,
an empty space in my closet
where I can hang this sweater
and just let the sunburn
blister and fade.

You can’t get it wrong, they say.
So I sit. And breathe. I trust.
And I try so hard to empty my mind.
But oh, the burning itch.
Oh the blistering relentlessness
of thought.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.