[Header Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash]

i am lost
i am found

can’t you just
can’t you just leave
can’t you just leave me
can’t you just leave me alone

leave us alone
with this life of ours

have your peace
and eat it too

but leave me be
alone with this peace of mine

i am happy to live
on banana and peanut butter sandwiches

just as long as i
no longer must worry

about your impending doom
the incessant cost of all of this

i am lost
i am found

learning to swim
refusing to drown

—P.L. Thomas

[Header Photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash]

we almost
give up

then spring
arrives just in time

seducing us
like children

a geese-covered lawn
green painting over the brown

we look up into the bright blue sky
expecting balloons like a rainbow

fooled again
we humans hoping

winter fading
then spring

—P.L. Thomas

By Steven Hyatt

[Header Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]

sometimes she couldn’t remember
why her parents named her aphasia

a memory sitting wordless
in the center of her chest

like a hint of a dream floating
around the edges of her mind

unwilling or unable to find her tongue
to be spoken into a story

her parents were careless and happy
always talking or laughing or both

aphasia often closed her eyes
and recalled them dancing and smoking

steeling her memories against forgetting
since they had long ago left this life

before sleeping she whispered her name
the way her mother did to wake her

her mother always gently toughing her face
asking if she had a beautiful dream

she did remember that she mostly replied
she knew she had dreamed but couldn’t recall

so she’d whisper her name like a prayer
and remind herself to remember her dreams

but aphasia still woke alone and wordless
hoping this would be a day to remember

—P.L. Thomas

[Header Photo by jurien huggins on Unsplash]

sleeping
you shift
beneath the sheets

your foot
touching mine

instead of moving
you press it
warmly there

what were we
fighting about?

—P.L. Thomas

this fisherman fully clothed and hatted
finds himself no longer in need of oars

a siren nude lying head turned back against him
and reaching for his shoulders and flailing arms

they are caught by Knut Ekwall’s brush
in this blink of painting and vortex of desire

the siren’s red hair mixing into the spinning water
swallowing the boat like her, the fisherman’s heart

we have only his face and her white body
to speculate about art and myth and desire

but we know what this sounds like and how it feels
to let go and spin away into the heart and flesh

i, no fisherman and you, no siren but all the same
we know what this sounds like and how it feels

this abandonment of being drawn into the depths
and facing the inevitable slide of you and me

breathing the water of us

[Header Photo by Bryan Dickerson on Unsplash]

1.

if he falls from this tree
(he doesn’t know how he got there)
bones will break

he will be a broken man
he will be a fallen man

2.

she sets herself on fire
and waits for everyone else

to put it out

3.

at 6 or 7 or 8
no one told them
this is where they’d be
this is who they’d be

of course
no one could have told them

of course
even if someone could have told them
they would never have listened

—P.L. Thomas

[Header Photo by Dominic von Eichel-Streiber on Unsplash]

my mother drank her coffee black

but the sweet southern tea
she steeped for us tasted like syrup

these drinks her life

that stained cup for herself
stark solitary and bitter

that jar carefully measured for her family
a sustenance like a dessert iced in a glass

“is it sweet enough?” she’d ask my father each time

—P.L. Thomas

[Header Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash]

So where are the strong and who are the trusted?

“(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” Elvis Costello

Aunt Celia, your sister, is gay.
Don’t you even care about her

Over and over this same plea
Lies had claimed her father

Fear had erased something important
Hate had left him unrecognizable

I have it right here tapping his smart phone
This will show you, this will

Love you, Dad, but I just can’t
Endings are never fairy tales

Right here, I have it right here

—P.L. Thomas