During 2020, I started publishing some of my poetry on Medium. Some of it I published directly, a great deal of it has been published by Jonathan Greene on the publication Loose Words.
The stats on medium are notoriously bad, but here’s the top five just sort of pulling from…
At the beginning of 2021, I decided to participate in the #100Rejections challenge. I don’t remember where I originally heard about it, but the challenge is to submit your work over 100 times to ensure that you get rejected by 100 journals. It sounded like a great way to learn…
In the woods, the ravens called hey
like a loud boy pulling a scratched face
through tangled brush.
No amount of sleeping bag
can block out the panic. It’s a loud shout
of hey in choir falsetto like someone
stealing candy from a shocked playmate
somewhere else within the campground.
No…
I love that she wears my clothes —
too big, ransacked from my closet,
an avalanche of evidence pouring
from the top shelf where she selected
a baggy sweater to cover
her teenage perfection.
Mother told her to tell the truth,
but I know the form
of a peace sign…
1
I will find my way off
the wheel, like mill water
I’ll slip from the zenith, pay back
my potential with a scattered dive.
This falling is a form of freedom.
2
I will find myself at the end,
how a spitting pugilist drops
a strapping boot on dried bloodstains…
After dropping seeds, I savor the moment;
that one after you fill the bird feeder,
and wait with a tense shudder
for a little magic to appear. He returned
today, a glowing apple of meat,
flicking seeds with a larvae tongue,
cocked and twitchy, inventing deadly traffic
in his small…
It takes a special pain to scissor credit cards
into the sink, a small act of prison panic
during a summer alone in the hills upstate,
in the vacant aisles of a midday grocery store,
in an empty matinee movie theater
where the only other person chooses
to sit right…
To sit in the morning and sip coffee
and read and weep without tears and
push my fingers into my temple
and blow out a breath with a pop
as the clock ticks one more minute
in a winter rain that leans against
the first frost of garden destruction
where…
and the kids all sing
in their rooms,
separate parts stitched
together, a quilt of voices,
lifelines for the world,
painted dark and vivid,
but with water on cement,
seen in the sun
and then gone.
©️ Trapper Markelz 2022
If you enjoyed reading this poem, please consider:
My life is pretentious — like an open
earring that waits on the back of a toilet,
an empty red pen that once wrote out titles,
that once wrote out exceptions.
The pens do not remember my mistakes.
I’m forgettable, like the mid-air collision
of two honeybees trying to find…
Trapper Markelz (he/him) is a poet who writes from Boston, MA. His work has appeared in numerous journals and publications. Check out http://trappermarkelz.com
