Some poems I hope to get published

Between the lines


You are sleeping

5 hours ahead me

And three thousand one hundred and seventy six

Miles

Stamped on my letter

Sent to the only address I could find

Unfolding the Atlantic Ocean

Memorizing every line

The coordinates of your irises

Tell me you are 53 degrees North

And 8 degrees West

It is 6:39 am

There

It is 1:39 am

Here

I stay up

Waiting for those scribbled lines

To fix the time zones in between

Until they are nothing more than a piece of pasta

On a plate we share






12am


A smoking cigarette would dangle from your fingers

If it weren't for the creosote stains on your lungs



The lungs of your grandfather

Who wont stop coughing despite

Every glass of sweet tea that touches his lips



The lips you kiss home from the mine

The taste of sweat and coal dust



Dusty children fishing in the creek

The sun beats down mercilessly

Their little tan bodies wearing

The clothes on the line that used to be white



White like the ceiling you stare up at

Collapsed on your bed after stripping



Strip-mining

The bare mountains that lay outside your window

Hidden in the night



The night that trains run through

Loaded with sparkling black coal

Blood and sweat

The debt generations have been paying

For these black diamonds



Diamonds that cut like the train tracks through every county

Counties filled with people made of thin invisible steel



Steal back the burnt out shells of past homes

Steal back the lives that lived within those walls

Steal back all the blood and breath

Steal back the sound of silence



Silence as the preacher reads of

Elisha's lips touched with a burning coal

The embers of all that was taken

Burning behind your closed eyelids

But you sleep

And the mountains survive

And the thin invisible steel stays

And the green trees grow again proud

Reaching once again for the sparkling black sky