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