by Warren Gaston | Nov 3, 2020
We are not taking sides. We are making sides. We have drawn a line down the center of our paper and now we are sick. We have made sides where before no sides existed. On one side of the line there is nothing. On the other side there is also nothing. Both sides of the...
by Warren Gaston | Nov 1, 2020
Some days you get up in the morning and forget quite why you are alive. It’s been raining all night. Rain falling still. The morning sky barely brighter than the night sky. Your slippers are wrong under the bed, right where left should be, left where right should be,...
by Warren Gaston | Oct 30, 2020
The first thing to note: this is a poem. Not an email to a friend about how you spent an afternoon. Not a travel brochure describing a mountain lake. Not an observation of boats moving back and forth. This is a poem, a complex of words to use as a lens to see an...
by Warren Gaston | Oct 26, 2020
Where are they going? These revelers floating on rectangles. These escapees from the jaded shore. These jolly mariners going to where they have already never been with people they have always never known. Cruising back and forth. Back and forth. The weaver party...
by Warren Gaston | Oct 25, 2020
Out the window of a bus I witness a small drama, a man and his mother sit at a sidewalk café. His eyes are smeared with tears and smoke. She crushes her burnt cigarette and gestures for her son to come closer. He scoots his chair toward her, leans in, drapes his arm...
by Warren Gaston | Oct 21, 2020
God was a long way gone. From earth. Picking up speed. Moving right along. Leaving. Behind. God was unfulfilled orbiting the sun. A change of scenery? Needed. Away awhile, there were physical things God missed. Humans barely noticed these...
by Warren Gaston | Oct 20, 2020
He woke in the morning with ash on his face. “What happened last night,” he asked his wife. “Did the house burn down?” “No,” she answered. “The world is on fire.”
by Warren Gaston | Oct 17, 2020
Here’s the situation: -the scab has been ripped off wounding white racism, -the Gulf Coast is ravaged by hot ocean hurricanes, -the parched forests of California are fevered with fire, -covid-19 is ravaging the planet cough by cough, -right-winged militias have sensed...
by Warren Gaston | Oct 12, 2020
*HINT: This poem is not about shoes. My shoes no longer trust my feet to guide their lives. They crave autonomy from my ambulatory mind. In the beginning, they were quite content to be tied to my body by the strings of will threaded through the eyelets of convenience....
by Warren Gaston | Oct 8, 2020
The second to last time I saw a living fly, the fly was on my neighbor’s cat. The cat was dead.
