Visit the Best of Small Press Poets-Joanna M. Weston/Michael Lee Johnson & Others Well Known Poets Here! Page # 2.

TWO POEMS BY JOANNA M. WESTON
 

ENDPAPER
By Joanna M. Weston
 
Joanna M. Weston
British Columbia,
Canada
the book has the smell
of past owners

drips of honey
paint and butter scattered
on words I sweated

asides scribbled
in margins

blue ink slants
across the endpaper
‘for Christmas
from Auntie Maud’

my book-launch
handed down


TALES OUT OF SCHOOL
By Joanna M. Weston

does my story end
where the bagman dances
along lines of telephone poles
beside an empty beach

or with the snap of cord
when the plane launches
from a heaving deck
and the pilot pulls back and up
while pastures carom away
under flight

it’s in the mewl of a kitten
nudging its mother’s belly
and a woman’s tears
when heart-attack claims

from these come beginnings
as my story drops out of paper
into the sigh of a mine-shaft

JOANNA M. WESTON. Married; has two cats, multiple spiders, a herd of deer, and two derelict hen-houses. Her middle-reader, ‘Those Blue Shoes', published by Clarity House Press; and poetry, ‘A Summer Father’, published by Frontenac House of Calgary. Her eBook, ‘The Willow Tree Girl’ at her blog: http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com/ An interview of Joanna M. Weston can also be read at:
http://poetsinterviews.blogspot.com/p/canadian-poet-joanna-m-weston.html



TWO POEMS BY MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON, ITASCA, IL.

You Can't Love a Corpse (V2)
By Michael Lee Johnson

You can't love a corpse
cause a corpse can't
love for free-
between being here once,
now gone.
 

Years pass
memories of then
photograph in heart now.


There he is on hard times,
hollow days,
Christmas Eve playing
Halloween tricks.

He speaks memories in
your eyes, they keep you twisting.

The cheers, the methodology,
the mirror, pools, of dark still water-
history is  the way your face looks
when you wake up from this dream.

He was the best of images reflected.
 
The deep frost
amber memories
expose his face tonight
the way it was-
antiquities ceremonies
of the living dead.
 
The farm, this farmer,
children,
campfires,
hayrides, friends,
harvester,
this way the Ottawa,
Illinois sky covers
its face with orange smears.
 
Little sticks of carrots
pop up from the ground,
farm reports and crop prices,
neighbors’ yellow harvest the corn.

Phillip was/is a good man
gone piecemeal dry.
 
Everything comes back
in brilliant face,
colors, autumn leaves,
then passes quiet
back into the night.
Somber, sober, this marking
of fragments I share this
space in time with you.
 
-2013-
(Revised 09-22-13)

 
If I Were Young Again
By Michael Lee Johnson (V3)

  Piecemeal summer dies:
  long winter spreads its blanket again.

  For ten years I have lived in exile,
  locked in this rickety cabin, shoulders
  jostled up against open Alberta sky.

If I were young again, I’d sing of coolness of high
mountain snow flowers, sprinkle of night glow-blue meadows;
I would dream and stretch slim fingers into distant nowhere,
yawn slowly over endless prairie miles.
 
The grassland is where in summer silence grows;
in evening eagles spread their wings
dripping feathers like warm honey.

If I were young again, I’d eat pine cones, food of birds,
share meals with wild wolves;
I’d have as much dessert as I wanted,
reach out into blue sky, lick the clouds off my fingertips.

But I’m not young anymore and my thoughts tormented
are raw, overworked, sharpened with misery
from torture of war and childhood.
For ten years now I've lived locked in this unstable cabin,

  inside rush of summer winds,
  outside air beaten dim with snow.

-1985-
(Revised 11-12)
 
MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON lived 10 years in Canada during the Vietnam Era, now Itasca, IL, runs seven poetry sites, has 56 videos of YouTube, published 4 books/chapbooks, and has been published in 25 countries as of this date: http://poetryman.mysite.com/. You Can’t Love a Corpse can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odLZKePENNo You can view Indiana Poem (V3) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcTqK09pxlk
An interview of Michael Lee Johnson, can be found by scrolling down: http://poetsinterviews.blogspot.com/
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 




 

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