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Jennifer
© Jennifer Stroud Wirth
By: Shawn Nacona Stroud
Mississippi Crow Magazine
*Double click on the image to make it large enough to read the poems.
Shawn Nacona Stroud
© Shawn Nacona Stroud
Mississippi Crow Magazine
*Double click on the image to enlarge it enough to read the poems.
Shawn Nacona Stroud
© Shawn Nacona Stroud
Mississippi Crow Magazine
*Double click the picture to enlarge it enough to read the poems.
Charlotte, NC
© Shawn Nacona Stroud
Each evening our shadows escape,
the sun lowers, and they steal
away under the cover of night.
I have seen mine
in those last moments, elongated,
trailing along behind me.
Then I turn around,
and he is gone. He unfastened
the Velcro that connects us
hands and feet, and slipped
off down the street.
I came upon them,
one midnight walk in South Beach.
Leaving the world of neon
and pastel hotels behind me -
I stepped off the bike path,
my feet sinking in white sand,
and saw them all congregated
with their own kind.
They pretended to be us
as they walked along the beach.
Two sat on the steps
of the lifeguard shack smoking,
and I saw shadows bobbing
like corks in the ocean.
I walked towards the waters edge,
and felt myself fading
as I slowly became one of them.
© Shawn Nacona Stroud
*This poem previously appeared in Mississippi Crow Magazine and Here and Now.
*View from on South Beach at night.
Pigeon Forge, TN
© Shawn Nacona Stroud
Poetry From The Darkside Vol.2
Here is a sample of some of the poem I had published in the Anthology Poetry from the Darkside Vol.2.
The First Time
a boy broke it off
with me, he looked
me in the eyes and said:
“Fags don’t serve papers,
they tell you to get the fuck out!”
I learned then what love is about.
Since then, I fin through my world:
a Siamese Fighting Fish,
ready to attack my own kind.
©Shawn Nacona Stroud
A Son’s Intuition
(For my mother)
I floated, a tadpole,
breathing the murky
fluids of your womb.
I held on
as the water level drained
into a tunnel of light.
My newly formed fingers anchored
into your cerise silk tissue—
they had to cut me out.
When I saw the seam split, I felt
slicked fingers dig for me.
I reached for anything vital,
I reached to draw blood—
tried to stop you from being
my mother even as I was born.
With one ovary torn like a fruit
from the tree of your body, the doctors
crowded in around you
to dam your blood
while a nurse wiped your insides
off my newborn flesh.
©Shawn Nacona Stroud
She is a Lioness
circling her cage,
jilted with three young cubs.
She roars,
her brown eyes chagrined,
a patch of dark girding
the cleft of her thighs.
Her chestnut locks sway
to her paced fury
as she wears an O into the floorboards.
Occasional peeks
through the blind-slits for father
diverts her.
She renders us invisible
before we brave the living room,
but soon her eyes will oscillate
into focus.
She’ll pounce us like prey,
shred our youth away
with talon words.
Such furrows
only miracles can mend.
©Shawn Nacona Stroud
Guide Dogs Only
She must think he’s her guide,
hand looped as a handle
for the leash of his arm. She jerks
him back by twitching fingers
onto the curb of Orange and Church,
her gauze taped eye titillates sunlight
like the mad iris of an angered God,
nose crinkled as if tainted
by car-carbons that smog
Orlando streets— then the beats:
thwack, thwack, thwack,
and the metallic clank of an aerosol can
when her handbag whacks his back.
Worthless little shit’s and You idiot’s wail
over the rattle of light-stopped cars
as pedestrians rush by like late
executives, hurry off to conjured
cubicles. She draws
a pointed heel back, a punter,
ready to deliver a blow. I step forward
out of his future to stop her.
©Shawn Nacona Stroud
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