Scribbled affection
dusted in bone-ash blowback
paneful messages
gazing in
Attic exhibit
Defensively tucked away
Eight panes
Eight years
— Tony Lee Orr
Tag: life
Crime Story
624 Thesselonia Avenue
10:51 a.m., March 25
What have we got here?
Boys on the way to school found her.
They touch the body, move anything?
Nah, they were so scared they took off running.
Got an ID? Got any identifying marks?
Nope, dress has no pockets, probably just a tart.
Or a goddess, Lenny, you know it’s hard
To tell ‘em apart on the road in the dark.
Dun. Dun. Continue reading “Crime Story”
Spring Train
They were fifteen and smoked Lucky Strikes
on the train to Tulsa. Both wore their best dress.
Montie Jean’s was blue taffeta with lace
crocheted along the collar. She had to stand
or stroll to keep it from creasing at her hips. Continue reading “Spring Train”
Witching House
Welcome to a witching
house
(we wear our robes
of disenchantment
very well)
This is an invitation – limited
Time offer
Special opportunity
For private eyes only
Red tag sale— Continue reading “Witching House”
Frost’s Forest in Your Head
On this day, March 7, in 1923, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published by the New Republic. This poem is one of the first that I set to memory. I carry it with me everywhere I go.
I carry its emptiness through my busy, busy days. The little horse shaking its harness bells is such a quiet sound in the midst of the teenage voices and car engines and noise of TV and computer that fill my days.
The “easy wind and downy flake” are suspended in my bones while I try to shut the car door against the southern Oklahoma wind and grab for my sunglasses in the stark light of the day.
I pass a slew of abandoned farmhouses on my way to work each morning but none seem as quiet, as lyrical, as lonely as the one that is not even near on that “darkest evening of the year.”
The death wish that some people say Frost’s poetry contains is always present with life. In the midst of life, we are . . . and so it goes (as Vonnegut would say). This poem about wanting to sleep in the dark and deep woods is the network of veins under our skin.
The blood is our desire to go another mile, just one more mile, before we sleep. Thank you, Robert Frost, for the gift of your forest that fills my life.
–Shaun Perkins
Eating the World
The wind lifted me from the concrete,
and I bobbed safely down the hill,
my toes glancing through the green grass
as Sally Field’s hat shepherded the breeze.
If I cut through the park on my way downtown,
I passed the Indian boy’s house–Jon-Jon,
now upright in the valley like the burnt
stump of a oak felled for firewood. Continue reading “Eating the World”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 