Emalisa Rose

With precision perfection,
her holiday cookies, in serrated
edged trees, elves and red
mistletoe, confection’s delights.

Mine were haphazard, sloppy
but the tastiest bells on the plate.
We’d battle to be our mom’s favorite.

My rival, my sister, my all time
best friend, with one fight too many,
each waits for the other’s apology.

Nine on the nightingale
four on the firmament, six
on the cirrus clouds, clanking.

On the rain, I wrote seven.

I wrote through the stink hours
the stars in remiss; the moon
weeping over the wildflowers.

While the pen bled the blues
I just wrote

as the night grew more lonely

***
the night you went back
to her.

The moon’s gone round
the cuckoo’s clocked out.
I’ve circled six summers without you.

But it all drizzles down
with this half pint of Hennessy.

You taught me the semi-colon
how to make sauce from tomatoes
and how to write from the gut.

Your cologne lives its life out
in the notebook I buried your sonnets in.

What began as a poem, morphs into a recipe
for ways to forget you
and that shirt that you left on my nightstand
full of sweat, sex, and Marlboros,
was cut into rags –
for cleaning the poop up
when kitty kat misses the litter box.

They write stories for me;

on the branch, off the branch
zip lining, crisscrossing, aerial
artists, designing on sycamores

this window watch Wednesday
northeast November
frostbite and filigree

the squirrel time, story hour
inviting me in
to all that was hidden
now that the leaves are gone.

When it’s gone,

there’s that moment
you realize

that you no longer
think about it

and sparrows

start writing you
poems again.

With a mutual penchant for
old timey markets, film noir,
and posthumous tributes to very
dead poets, we’d connected.

Imbibing on moonshine, divinity and
your blue tambourine, we made art in
an all night rococo, rounding the clock.

Then we simultaneously parted, for
reasons, unknown.

The canvas, part empty, mid a quandary
of questioning, brushstrokes and sudden
erasures.

Our poems on the nightstand, glimpse
an etch-a-sketch theater, of our “once
was the time.”

thematic of lovers
at breakup; this one
is hinting, then he comes
in for the kill

this one is fancy
with tight terminology
’bout how it’s determined
who’s in and who’s out

this one is terse, mad,
unforgiving; smashing my
inner child, with barely
a nod of ‘try us another time’

this one is madness on
moonshine; i swear she is wasted
going on with apology, then
offers a rose, fawning over my
poetry, but yet pulls the plug on it

this bitch is mea my culpa on me,
berating how i know not the rules
to dare not submit the trite simultaneous
after she tied up my poem for 3 months

and this one — exclusively yours, my dear editor
thrash it to pieces; please don’t send it back to me.