It's the 2025 Poem-A-Week Challenge! (This is a *poems only* thread.)

[goddessofglee]

№3

Weeks and Whispers

Wednesday evenings melted into rain.
Winona whistled; Wynn would hum in kind.
They danced through puddles, skipped the subway train,
shared shawls and stories, stitched with hands entwined.
She wore his sweaters backwards, sleeves too long.
He left her notes in books she hadn’t read.
They made a life of silence stitched with song,
and laughed in bed and kissed and always said—


№19 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№4

The Wedding Waltz

One October when the maples flamed,
he knelt beside the table where they met.
Her latte steamed. Her cheeks were softly named
with roses. "Winona—" but she let
her arms reply. The barista popped champagne.
A stranger clapped. The windows wept with rain.
Their kiss was stitched from sugar, steam, and thread,
and no one said a word when tears were shed.


№20 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№5

The Wonderfully Ordinary Days

Now Winona wakes to Wynn and cups of tea,
and Whitmere weaving patterns at their feet.
She yawns, uncombed, and smiles sleepily,
then takes her place in sunlight's gentle seat.
He slides the comics to her, keeps the news.
Their rings catch light. Their bills lie in a stack.
They argue who refills, whose turn to snooze,
and laugh, and love, and kiss, then circle back.


№21 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№6

The Whispered Wrong

Five winters passed in warmth, until the day
Ms. Winniver, while pruning vines, confessed:
"I see Wynn's car alone, most nights they say—
that Wren picks her from work. She's always dressed..."
Just words, like splinters wriggling through the stone.
Wynn brushed it off, but doubt had cracked the bone.

№22 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№7

The Terrible Tuesday

He saw them laughing in the coffee booth—
Wren, just returned from far across the sea.
But Wynn, now poisoned, couldn’t taste the truth.
He wandered home through sleet and memory.
The letter opener, silver in its frame,
was just a gift from Grandma long ago.
But when she walked in humming his old name,
his voice was ice: "Was he your secret, though?"


№23 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№8

The Crimson Conclusion

But jealousy had eaten through his mind.
The silver flashed. Her eyes went wide with shock—
not pain, but sadness for the love gone blind.
She fell like autumn leaves. The kitchen clock
kept ticking. Wynn saw her phone light up:
"Thanks for the birthday lunch! - Cousin Wren"
The letter opener clattered. Like a pup,
he crawled to her, but she was past recall.
He turned the blade around. They fell together,
winter roses blooming on the floor.

№24 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№9

The Strange Spring

In Vendmere, come next May,
a couple browsed for wedding rings downtown.
"I'm Winona," she would laugh and say.
"I'm Wynn," he'd reply without a frown.
They’d no memory of meeting once before,
just felt they’d known each other all their lives.
The jeweler mentioned, "Strange—we had in store
another couple just like you... with knives
engraved upon their bands. They never came
to pick them up." But Winona felt a chill.
Wynn just smiled and said, "That's such a shame."
They bought plain bands instead, paid up the bill.


№25 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№10

The Wedding Warning

Their wedding day dawned perfect, pink and bright.
The chapel filled with strangers, all in white.
As Winona walked the aisle, she felt... not right.
The priest’s words echoed strangely in the light:
"If anyone objects..." A woman stood—
Ms. Winniver, from a life they'd never lived.
"I've seen this all before. It's not for good.
You've done this dance where nothing is forgiven."

But Winona laughed and Wynn took her hand.
They said "I do" beneath the swaying trees.
That night, she found an hourglass of sand
beside their bed. "What's this?" "I've lost my keys,"
said Wynn, searching, frantic. On the glass,
etched small: "Third time’s the charm, or so they say."
Outside their window, two red roses passed,
floating on the wind like yesterday.

They held each other close but couldn’t sleep,
both haunted by a song they’d never learned,
and promises they couldn’t seem to keep,
and silver things, and roses that had burned.


№26 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№11

The Silver Flash

Ms. Winniver pulled on the trigger from her coat—
"I end the cycle here, I break the chain!"
The chapel gasped. No time for any note
of why or how she'd found them here again.
Two shots rang out like bells. Both Winona, Wynn
crumpled at the altar, red on white.
Ms. Winniver smiled. "Now they’ll learn their sin—"
But something streaked through stained-glass window light.



№27 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№12

Whitmere’s Revenge

Their Whitmere—but how could their cat be here?—
launched at Ms. Winniver’s throat with rage,
as if he’d waited lifetimes for this year,
this moment, this particular stage.
She screamed and fired wildly at the air
while Whitmere tore and bit with fury strange.
The wedding guests just sat and watched and stared
as if they couldn’t move, as if the change
from wedding to this carnage was a dream.
Ms. Winniver fell. The cat sat, licking paws,
then walked to where the couple lay supreme
in death, and waited, as if there were laws
that said: not yet, not yet, but soon, but soon.



№28 of 52

 

[goddessofglee]

№13

The Obscure Epilogue

In Windmere, or some place lost in spring,
a couple met. She spilled his coffee cup.
"I'm..." But the names got tangled on the tongue.
Behind them, in the corner, sat a pup—
or was it cat?—with golden eyes that knew
the taste of truth and blood and bitter time.
The coffee shop had roses, red not blue,
and somewhere, bells began their wedding chime.

The barista hummed and wiped the counter clean:
"Third time’s a charm," she muttered to the air,
"or is it fourth?" But no one heard between
the laughter and the love that blossomed there.

Outside, Ms. Winniver sold red roses fresh,
no memory of bullets, cats, or death—
just flowers blooming, beautiful as flesh,
and whispered words beneath her breath:
"Some circles close, some circles start anew,
some cats remember what their humans forget.
I’ll see you at the altar, dressed in blue,
my darlings. We’re not finished yet."

And Whitmere, in the corner, cleaned his face,
and waited for the coffee cup to fall,
and time to fold again through bitter grace,
and love to bloom, and die, and bloom through all.



№29 of 52

 

[Tzara]

She Wore a Flack Jacket

all glitz and gold
with her honeyed tongue a match,
gathering reporters like flies

caught in a web spun of hyperbole,
hipness, hypocrisy, hypnosis,
and God knows whatever else

she could conjure up to keep
attention focused on her clients'
careers, fragile as eggs

juggled by a dyskinetic clown
in some jerkwater circus.
A kilowatt smile

and a shipping container
full of cut-rate compliments
her only tools

to ward off despair or unemployment.
She switches on Affability
and polishes Charm

to a high gloss finish,
hoping hoping hoping one, at least,
of those she represents hits

something like The Big Time
so she can relax into retirement
in some Richard Neutra residence

in a gated community
sited on an exclusive golf course
somewhere in the semi-wilds of Palm Springs.

Week 29 : Poem 1 : Total 36



She Wore a Flak Jacket

to shield herself from the shrapnel
of ex-boyfriends' sneers
and the catty asides

other women might spit
in her general direction
when she'd waltz off the dance floor

with that cute guy from Love Island
in his third year of med school
whose parents owned

twenty percent of glytz.com
(pre IPO). Could it possibly be her fault
that her genes were perfect

and her jeans fit her hips
like shrinkwrap? Personality, girls.
Personality. And some black Fleur du Mal

knickers to grab his attention
if he ever gets that far.
Don't be jealous, dahlings,

just spend more quality time in the gym.

Week 29 : Poem 2 : Total 37

 

[42BelowsBack]

She wore a flak jacket

In tableau, a coupled needle
shiny skinned black spinning
out of jacket the racket deux
de rigueur dance floor. 1954.

No 8 of an unlikely 52

 

[_Land]

Walt, Unbuttoned

They tried to press you
between pages
like a flower
flattened, floral,
safe.

But you refused the bloom
without the stem,
the scent
without the soil,
the line
without the moan.

You wrote yourself in sweat
bare-chested and unashamed,
your poems thick
with the musk of dockworkers,
campfires,
and men who didn’t flinch
at another man’s gaze
lingering too long.

They called you obscene
because you touched the sacred
with hands that had touched
everything else.

You spoke of tongues
and thighs
and the God that lives
in a trembling body,
not a distant cloud.

You held soldiers
as they bled,
whispered elegies
into their broken mouths
like kisses.
You loved them
not as heroes,
but as men.
Warm. Mortal.
Yours.

You gave us
Calamus,
that green blade
of longing,
that impossible love
written down
anyway.

They burned your name
in reviews.
Fired you.
Erased you from parlors.
But still,
your leaves
spread.

Still,
the grass grows queer
and singing.

Still,
we find ourselves
in your open body
of work,
held in the endless
yes
of your mouth.


60/52

 

[_Land]

Catullus the Catalyst

You didn’t whisper,
you howled
in meter.

Lust as weapon.
Grief as venom.
Your ink wasn’t mirror
it was a middle finger.

You turned elegy
into ammunition,
made mockery a lyric,
slander an art form.

Mamurra—the fat purse of Caesar’s Rome
you stripped him naked
with a hexameter.
Called him cockless,
called him property,
called him owned
by the emperor’s desires.

You dared to say
what courtiers swallowed.

You made Latin blush,
then beg for more.

Lesbia
your love, your ruin,
your altar of appetite
you praised her with such
seething hunger,
even your jealous poems
bled.

“I hate and I love.”
You turned contradiction
into gospel.



Not a poet,
a powder keg.

Rome thought it could cage
its corruption in togas,
but you,
you carved obscenity into the busts
of the gods themselves.

Even Caesar,
stone-throned
and blood-slicked,
had to laugh
when you aimed your tongue
like a dagger
and kissed him with it.

You didn’t write for immortality.
You wrote
to be heard
now.

To rupture.
To sting.
To mark the pulse
of a city
too proud to flinch.


61/52

 

[_Land]

The Mouth of Orchards

for Pablo Neruda

We are the fruit
of your hunger,
Pablo.

We are
ripe with resistance,
heavy with metaphors
our mothers and fathers didn’t speak
but lived.

You wrote the sea
into the mouths of miners,
turned salt and stone
into lullabies.

And we bloomed.

You peeled back
the onion of the people,
layer by tearful layer,
until the world could taste
how sweet the suffering
had become
in your mouth.

We grew
from every seed
you spit in exile.

We are the grapes
pressed in silence,
bottled beneath dictatorship,
uncorked
at your funeral,
when thousands chanted
your name
as a weapon
and a prayer.

We are children
of verses
that smelled like bread
and sounded like thunder.

Even now,
we ripen in Chilean soil,
in protest chants,
in schoolyard notebooks,
in long-distance love letters
sealed with Neruda’s breath.

You were not a man,
you were an orchard
with a mouth
full of sunlight
and rage.

We who bloom
in your absence
carry your words
in our bellies,
in our voices,
in every poem
that dares to say
what power would silence.

We don’t spread your ashes.
We spread your seed.

62/52

 

[Angeline]

Saturday

Judy wears a black leather jacket.
I sit on the church steps
and St Anthony's rises up
around me, brick and stone
to comfort me
while she makes her confession.

We walk past Casino's, La Gondola,
and the Italian People's Bakery,
past double-parked cars,
laughter and cat-calls, rude
gestures, good-natured
neighborly ribbing to greet
this morning in the Burg.

Her Nonna Rosita wears an apron,
calico, tied at the waist. She's frying
long green peppers, picked today
from her rooftop garden.

The pan sizzles and pops.
She adds oil, rubs dried oregano
between her palms and flakes
rain on the pan. She points
at the peppers. See? They jump
if you no get all the water
off before-a you fry.

She sings about Roma
in her sweet, tremulous voice,
makes us thick pepper and egg
sandwiches that taste like home.




Week 29, Poem 1, Total 29

 

[MrMrsMrsMr]

How I write a poem.

I dance with the honey bees
honeycombed in memories I,
my, mind flowing somewhere
I’ve been. A forbidden nectar
imbibed. Bee like the poems
are a singular sting posted in
escaping the hive-mind they
die regrettably reflecting on
how bees are little poems
flown far away from the hive.

20/52

 

[MrMrsMrsMr]

She Wore A Flak Jacket

She was a first time swinger
her eyes in open panorama

On a low apparatus
lay a woman
surrounded by many men,
withering and writhing,
bodily writing,
jacketing her in their ink

On the boiling mattressed
buttressed floor, still more
woman and men roiling,

she saw a woman still jacked
in fur, hips jacking jacket less
in transitive verb

& saw her husband hung out
bullet loaded in a non liquid
conducting jacket.

In her fresh envelope she
was emotionally ready for
her flak jacket to be a wet
space for temperature
controlled liquids to
circulate,

21/52

 

[Wonderer67]

Diagonal Lines

In a dream
I was at a picnic
It was idyllic and I was eating food
And enjoying myself

Until the fireworks went off
Behind me
I couldn’t see straight
I saw diagonal lines in my dream
And I was frozen
Unable to move
Locked in place

Not here
And not there
Not in a dream and
Not in reality
Disconnected and dissociated

Scared wasn’t the word for it
Something else had happened.

My ex wife came up at me screaming
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell us there would be fireworks?!”
She was furious with me - her dog was scared
Everything I could see
Was in layers somehow
But in front of that I only saw
Diagonal lines
In the green hue of night vision goggles

I couldn’t move or answer her

My platoon sergeant came up to me
And told me to get the fuck moving
That got me up on my feet at least
We looked for insurgents… ECs
We were looking all over
On every trail in the woods at my farm

Until we emerged in a railroad freight yard
I had to watch my steps on the rails and ties
No one was firing at us
But I knew that would change soon enough
I was in automatic mode
Something had kicked in
Just go mode
Don’t worry about fear
I’ll run all the way into Damascus
I thought
(I had no idea why I’d run towards Damascus)
Soon I was back in my farm

And then back in my bedroom
I woke up
To a loud thunderstorm

I was triggered
Wired all wrong
The diagonal lines
Had all gone away
And i could see

I grounded
By writing this
On my phone

20/52

 

[42BelowsBack]

Loss of Traction in my head

Traffic lights. In, decision, Traffic lights. In, decision,
red goes green, orange red greenOrangeRed green

Separated from indecision there is a rev counter in
my head -loss, of, —traction into bumper to bumper

Traffic lights. In. Decision, there is a red light burning
in my head.

No 9 of an unlikely 52

 

[_Land]

Seasoned Veterans

He stood
sleek in onyx skin,
a pillar of burn
pressed into steel cap
bitter-backed with a mouth full of bite.
Always the storm
in the center of the table.

She shimmered
milky and fragile,
porcelain hips swaying
with a grace that left fingerprints
of forgotten dinners.
She didn’t speak
unless summoned
but her silence seasoned everything.

They had danced
for generations.
Pass, pour, twist, spill
a ritual of tension
on linen battlegrounds.
He left stains.
She left reminders.

Every night
they leaned in closer.
She’d tilt,
he’d grind,
flavors fusing in shadow
while forks clattered and wine decayed.
Their love was never bland.

No vows.
Just a carousel of cravings
and the ache
of being emptied,
refilled,
emptied again.

Still, they danced.
Until the table cracked,
until the dinners stopped,
until even the candle
burned down to the wick

and still
they waited,
side by side,
sacred,
seasoned,
together.

63/52

 

[LustyScribe]

All Those Aboard
Reflections from a Cruise

A thousand thirsties,
A thousand more;
Still they come
Crossing the gangway.
Dragging too many clothes,
Too many hopes
For a week at sea.

For some a start;
Vows just ahead or
Aft, still awash in the waves
Of excitement.
I rejoice for them,
A hopeless romantic
Always willing to believe
For us, for them.

For them I create
Full lives, lived lustily.
I see scenarios
Where desires fire
Couplings the cabins could
Sell as porn.
My ears can't hear her
Moans, groans, pleas
For more, or his replies,
But my mind can.

Then there's those
Whose lives lost rhyme
And reason with time.
No more poetry,
Just sad prose that flows
Through the drink passes
They bought, knowing that
Smirnoff suffocates
And beer blinds
And Cuervo covers
The futility, the fatality
Of the dreams
They dreamt together.

Around us, beauty abounds.
Boobs, butts, bulges
Tattoos, some clear,
Some old smudges.
A bride to be
Her maids, all A's and B's,
Beside me, a beauty
In a brown bikini,
I can't look at long.
Exotics, to me erotic,
Brown, black, ivory
Myriad moms, milfs,
Whose curves, softness
Where taut skin was,
Self-conscious, self aware,
But this week...this week,
She wears THAT suit,
The one she ordered,
The one he wouldn't
Approve of.

But he's not there,
He and his affair
Went to Vegas
"On business."
So now she dares
And boldly bares
Thick thighs,
Breasts a size
Bigger than the bra.

She draws more eyes
With soft, thick thighs
Than the bridesmaids.
She's never played
But tonight...tonight?
If he can act right,
The guy from deck seven
Might just taste heaven.

For my wife,
The buffet is just as full.
A fairly fit father,
Salted & peppered;
"Good to his kids,"
And he's fifty and fit.

The dancer in the show,
With muscles, no spare tire
Is a glance, maybe two or ten.
I'll have to tip him
For the fire he lit
That made it to our room
That almost made it to Cozumel.

The Mexican cuties
With bountiful beauty
And full curvy culos;
My neck is sore and stiff
When we're back on board.
The rigidity remains
And even spreads
As we lay on the bed.
But she's tired and rests,
Maybe the day's best
Wasn't tacos and 'ritas.
Maybe she's dreaming?
Maybe the guide,
Maybe the fit father guy
Who wasn't old and worn
As he got on board?

Or maybe the shop girl
From another world?
Selling and sharing tears,
About hopes and fears,
Missing her family.
Brown, beautiful, and
She loves a woman.
But in two hours
We sail north.

I don't begrudge my mate
We all have desires to sate
Why deny your eyes,
Spout silly lies
When the buffet of flesh
Seems always fresh,
Runs bow to stern?
Four nights and days
She can freely gaze,
Think how it would be
With he or she
Or maybe they and we?
We share some thoughts,
Some tame, some hot.
I push fences back,
She wisely backtracks;
Some ideas to please,
Better left in open seas.

The ship sails north,
Slowly back, little wake
But relentlessly returns,
Dragging us all,
Kicking, screaming,
Drinking, dreaming
Back to reality's bites,
Starless nights,
Carrying memories
Credit card statements
And tiny flickers of hope,
When we hear Buffet again.

Maybe life can be better.
Maybe hubby dumps the side chick.
Maybe wife gives a reality check.
Maybe the bride stay
s true
Maybe mine carries the view
Of hot dad in her head
When we go to bed
For twenty more years,
Sharing hopes, dreams, fears
And memories
Of Margaritaville.

(Not sure of week or #)

 

[SpermFactory]

Arhs poetica
Feedback

Oooo Daddy oooo,
Was it good for you?
Did ya words get ya
off? ohh Baby you
wrote it for who?
5 hairy stars?????

Cum git sum. Bamm ️
damn ️ bam ️ Splat ️
splat! ️ Pubs side blows.
We suck. Stick it in forums
Oooo Daddy oooo forums
ya love is fo real

Mmmmm @melimelissa
@WCSGarland

(20)

 

[SpermFactory]

The discovery
of a back door.
“ Uh? ”
“ ugh! ugh! “
“ Oo! Oo! Oo!”
“ Erm, sperm? umm”
“Oops!? “

(21)