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

[Bn2f]

NEEDING A MOMENT


The November leaves on the maples and birch
In the woods behind my house take no notice
Of the hours I stand staring from my window
Coffee cup in hand waiting.
Waiting for a breeze to move them.
I am envious of their beautiful
Red and gold deaths.

“Give breath! Write it all down,” you begged,
“Let your emotions dance in the release
Of ink to paper.”

Savior. Love. My lost friend.
I need you now for inspiration as the words
I once wrote that you supported like no one other
Have betrayed me
And the fluid ink flow has dried.

“No cries!” you said and promised,
“I’ll make the autumn wind tap your window
To remind you again that I am right here
With you in spirit when you stumble bemoaning
Gone bones and my flesh.”

The November trees of maple and birch
In the woods behind my house take no notice
Of the hours I stand staring from my window
Coffee cup in hand waiting.
Waiting for a breeze to move them.
I am in need of your moments.

 

[_Land]

Mayonnaise, Not Miracle Whip
°


Let’s get one thing straight:
if you say “salad dressing” and mean that jar,
we can’t break bread together.
Miracle Whip is chaos in a condiment,
a tangy betrayal,
the bastard child of sugar and regret.

°

Mayonnaise is quiet competence.
It doesn’t shout; it emulsifies.
It binds potato, holds the tuna,
keeps the coleslaw faithful.
It’s the mortar of every church potluck sandwich,
a stoic custodian of creaminess.

°

Miracle Whip, meanwhile,
tastes like someone tried to invent joy in a lab
and forgot to consult a single grandmother.
It’s what optimism tastes like
when it’s been left in the sun.
Slick. Sweet. Slightly suspicious.

°

Mayonnaise knows restraint
egg, oil, acid, salt.
Four humble truths in a world of confusion.
Miracle Whip?
Seven sins in one spoon.
High-fructose hubris. Artificial salvation.
The devil in a squeezable jar.

°

Miracle Whip pretends to be fun at parties,
shows up late,
and leaves your potato salad
tasting like betrayal and poor judgment.
Mayonnaise brings napkins and loyalty,
the reliable friend who’ll stay
to help scrape the casserole dish clean.

°

You can keep your “zing.”
I’ll take subtlety,
the kind that doesn’t require a trademark.
When the sandwich apocalypse comes
and the bread runs dry,
only one spread will be worth trading for.

°

So, call it preference if you must.
But when civilization crumbles
and we’re rebuilding sandwiches by candlelight,
you’ll wish you’d stocked the good stuff.
Real mayo. The white flag of reason.
Because some miracles
just shouldn’t whip.

 

[Tzara]

Hallowe'en

The thin slice of a crescent moon,
The howl of shifting winds,
The flickering of candlelight
Through toothy pumpkins' grins.

Small children, costumed, walk the streets.
Those older roam with friends.

Some sate the goblins' ire with sweets,
While others suffer papered trees
Or have their windows soaped with glee.
All Hallow's Eve is here again.

Week 42 : Poem 1 : Total 56

 

[Angeline]

Bite Me Blues

Bite me Drac baby, bite me slow and sweet.
Drink me in baby, let me share my heat.
Your skin is marble, you feel cold as ice.
Sink those fangs in deep. Doesn't that feel nice?

I've tossed all the garlic, don't have a cross,
So drink me up Vladie, show me who's boss.
Can't see your reflection but you ain't lost:
I can see those bright teeth. You must have flossed.

Drink my blood honey, but don't take it all.
I'm getting so weak now, don't want to fall.
Let me sip on you: I won't leave a mark.
We can hunt together while the night's dark.




Week 42, Poem 1, Total 49

 

[kreemi_pi]

I think it is style that you seek
In this challenge, A Poem a Week
Alas, I just lim'rick,
A genre so limp dick
With rhymes that are all up Shit Creek

 

[Tzara]

I think it is style that you seek
In this challenge, A Poem a Week
Alas, I just lim'rick,
A genre so limp dick
With rhymes that are all up Shit Creek

Comment

Good limericks often are funny;
Are even so when they are punny.
We like how you write—
Your verses delight.
So keep up the limericks, honey.

Week 42 : Poem 2 : Total 57

 

[Ash999]

2 years
And 6 days
Later...
20 living Hostages
Have returned to the
Land of their Forefather......
It was great Joy :
In Hostages' Square ️
Too many emotions ...
Than one can hardly bear....
Witkoff, Rubio, Kushner too
Were all there...
We Thank You
Donald Trump!!!
Hoping, Peace
Doth Triumph!!!

 

[42BelowsBack]

A drunken sailor waffles
in with a rebellious Wind.

Cracked salt lips, I sailor downs
a beer. You know Wind everything
runs stronger when you’re about.

In your silence I hear you say -fuck off.

Three beers later, jus saying, you realize
when you howls you’re fucking mental.

Fourth beer. Cheers. Running in a breeze
I know you’re happy.

A Dozen Beers later. You knows you’re spiteful.
In sleet and really sly in slanted rain. A real fucking
hangover in a hurricane.

A drunken sailing hour latter. Perhaps, in your
dafense. When it rains you s really forced
to drink too much rain. Can’t aim, so, you just piss
rain over everywhere.

Man down. Sailor out of Beer. Drinking vodka. Wind,
you know you’re a bitch right? A male cunt, someone’s lover,
my unreliable can’t make your mind up best friend. Ya know.
Sometimes, homey, on land, some nights you even
dig the garden? You know that right?

It’s either that or some nights you’re on fucking drugs.

NQ 34

 

[Ash999]

And across the Line of Control
2000 detenus too returned:
To West Bank.....& Yes....to Gaza too....
Families R reunited...:
Euphoria to Palestinian & Jew!!!
Peace wud require Both Hands
To Clap for Allah,Yahweh .. Thee ....:
Peace wud require Both Lands
To Lovingly Agree..

 

[42BelowsBack]

On a suburban street
the footfalls within a
menagerie of ghouls
a posse of Vampires
candles and candies
in a cornucopia of life
bright eyed hopes and
undreamed dreams all
wait, warlocks, witches
Wednesday Adams all
outside the front door of
that spooky last house.
The pumkin bell cackles
MwahaahaaMwhaahaa

NQ 35

 

[SmilingLez]

"No ing word’s / adjectives / adverbs"

Sky shifts
light fades
soundless streets
hearts pulse
time moves

 

[42BelowsBack]

There are the trees stooped
Willow weep all their days
where swung the swing we
played the (x)hildren all we
who went a ways away on
a moonless night the sleep
-less path our early grave
like the moon we rise again
and play and play until we
dressed as ghouls plagued
the neighborhood houses
with gleeful howls of Trick
or Treat. Mwahahaamwha


PART TWO You know it’s
a horror of a poem
when there’s a
sequel.

NQ 36

 

[42BelowsBack]

No ing word’s / adjectives. / adverbs.

Lord Of The Rings.

The woman stood there a
volcano in the middle of
the kitchen, their humanity
denuded by his ring.

NQ 37

 

[Ash999]

Why do U cry. while embracing me?
why does your eyes' retina reflect the Stars
in the Galaxy?
i feel the shape of the river Padma in you...
before Birth, after Birth....still the River shapes you!!?
i have been born before when you were Padmaboti...
u were always tearful like Asrumoti!!
silently you used to define and worship Jatishwar!
in sheer silence you express the Meaning of Life...
in your teardrops i find my birth and death
why do you cry when U embrace me???
why fo your eyes' retina reflect the Stars of the Milky Way?!!

 

[_Land]

Losing Pretend
by Bear Sage

°

The maples strip down first,
all swagger and flame,
a public undressing before frost.

°

The oaks take their time,
they’ve always been stubborn
about change.

°

The wind scavenges what’s left,
sorting color from rot,
truth from habit.

°

I watch the branches
thin into honesty,
and think,

maybe the fall
was never about dying,
only about losing
the right to pretend.

 

[SmilingLez]

Curly hair
brushing my lips;
tender,
intimate,
inviting.

 

[Tzara]

Foraging
The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it.
—Sylvia Plath, “Kindness”

The long, fine line of her neck,
so pale in the icy moonlight,
that little flitter of her carotid

shivering under taut and flawless skin
inflames me, makes my canines ache
wanting to sink their eager cusps

into the rich sanguinary warmth.
How unfortunate, how wasteful
that I must needs drain that perfect body

and each lonely night seek another?

Week 42 : Poem 3 : Total 58

 

[kreemi_pi]

TANKA TANKOFF
by Kreemi

Took my tank top off
At Hermosa beach it was
Didn't have a bra
Let the girls play in the sun
Made a lot of brand new friends

 

[SmilingLez]

**(1.2) Write a metaphor, simile free poem: that describes an inanimate object**



Razor Wire

Cold steel coils stretch endlessly
Across concrete walls and empty yards
Sharp barbs catch morning light
While shadows dance below

Each twist holds stories
Of boundaries drawn in blood
Of desperation climbing higher
Only to fall back down

Silent guardian of secrets
You slice through escape dreams
Your metallic embrace promises
Nothing enters, nothing leaves

Rust spots bloom like wounds
Where rain has marked the years
Yet still you wait, patient
Ready to tear flesh from bone

 

[_Land]

Still, Life

The jar on the sill still smells of peaches.
Glass clouded from years of August hands.
A gnat circles the lip, lost in memory.

The porch light flickers though no one’s coming.
Moths slap it like drunks testing faith.
The screen door keeps count.

In the yard, the pump handle leans south,
iron spine bent from one too many winters.
It still drips — a slow apology to the clay.

You never said you were leaving.
The holler knew before I did.
Even the creek’s gone quiet about it.

 

[MaximTerhune]

Moonlight on bare skin,
whispers drift through tangled breath
night learns every curve

 

[_Land]

Walking the Backbone
By Bear Sage


Author’s Note:
The Appalachians are more than mountains; they are bone.
They held the first weight of a nation still learning to stand.
Through coal and timber, hymn and hunger, they carried the labor that built America’s body.
This poem follows a single hiker from Georgia to Maine along that ancient spine
listening to the land’s pulse, tracing where history still breathes beneath the soil.
Every step is both pilgrimage and remembrance.

°
Walking the Backbone
°

Red clay holds the first heartbeat.
Every step stains back.
Barns lean into wind, beams remembering sweat that paid for too much hope.
Pine sap thickens the air; tobacco ghosts drift through kudzu.
A mule fence crumbles beside a river still brown with promise.

He camps beneath a pecan tree.
Owls gossip through the dark, cicadas stitching the night closed.
The air hums with the ache of beginning.
By morning, sunlight already labors through the leaves.

°

Rhododendron tunnels swallow the path.
Hills carry the weight of work and memory.
Cherokee carvings surface in the stone, softened yet certain.
He drinks from a spring scented with rain and iron.
Fog drifts through the coves, folding cabins into quiet.

Above Clingman’s, sky opens.
Ridges lean together, ancient and alert.
Rivers braid eastward, salt riding their veins since before any border.

°

Soil thins; roots clutch rock.
Creeks carve deeper, hollers darker.
A trestle groans beneath his boots where freight once thundered through coal country.
Wind counts the emptiness.

Fields rust, lined with broken plows.
A man at a tailgate sells tomatoes,
lungs gray from dust and years underground.
They talk of rain. Hope stays unnamed.

Night finds him near Hot Springs.
Steam coils between poplar trunks.
A whistle wanders the distance.
The land holds hunger without apology.

°

Ridges widen.
Every bend begins another story.
Stone fences dissolve into fern,
what settlers abandoned when the soil turned against them.

In Damascus, boots swing from power lines,
a skyline built from endurance.
A woman selling pie calls him child
and says the mountain forgets kindly.

He climbs toward McAfee Knob.
Wind carries rust and pine.
He murmurs gratitude into dusk
and keeps walking.

°

The ground thickens again.
Coal seams breathe underfoot; he feels them shift inside his bones.
A creek below Harpers Ferry divides
one current seeking the Potomac, another the Shenandoah.

He stands where revolt flared and burned.
The bridge hums with ghosts still running.
Freedom still demands breath, blood, faith, distance.

Northward, the mines gape mute.
Grass reclaims the rails.
Wild violet rises where smoke once lived.
He presses his palm to the dirt and feels the mountain’s pulse
tired, but steady.

°

Stone walls narrow the trail.
Borders no one guards anymore.
He passes the ghost of Antietam,
the field restless beneath young grass.
Air hums like iron cooling after fire.

He rests where the Potomac bends,
water bright with sun.
The canal path parallels the river,
a scar healed but still visible.
He eats in the lockhouse shadow,
brick enduring longer than its purpose.

Salt touches the wind.
The bay waits somewhere east,
but he follows the spine, not the lungs,
and climbs again.

°

Stone hardens beneath his soles.
Rocks jut like warnings,
testing knees, patience, pride.
The mountains quit pretending to be kind.

Coal towns lean inward,
paint peeling from porches.
A church stands roofless,
walls still full of hymns.
He touches the pulpit; grit holds.
The same grit that forged and broke this country.

Steel towns whisper through valleys,
their stacks hollow, open to crows.
He crosses a bridge built by men
who never saw the sea,
each rivet a confession of work without rest.
Stars arrive earned.

°

Pines stand tall and unbending, their trunks straight as held breath.
The air turns clean again, sharp after the mines.
He moves through the Barrens where sand drinks the light,
each pool of water holding a small sky.

A clearing opens where the trail softens.
Ground gives beneath his weight; it feels young, still learning firmness.
A deer crosses ahead, ribs visible, quiet as truth.
Wind rises at High Point, tugging his sleeves.
He faces east, city glow faint on the horizon,
then turns north, unhurried and sure.

°

Bear Mountain lifts through haze, smelling of rain and metal.
The Hudson murmurs below, heavy with history.
Stone remembers labor—prisoners, builders, dreamers
men who worked without seeing what they shaped.

He camps near a ruined tower.
Graffiti shines under his headlamp, both defiance and prayer.
City lights flicker in the distance,
temptation humming beyond the trees.
He stays with darkness; the river steadies his breath.

Farther north the Catskills rise.
Wind grows rough.
He passes a dam, hears the surge
power pulled from surrender.

°

Stone fences knit the hills together.
Each one keeps account of hands that once divided everything they touched.
The path winds through birch and maple,
pale trunks guarding what the fields forgot.

A woman with a basket of apples smiles at him,
her family here since before the first war for independence.
When he asks about winter, she says it always lasts,
but it always ends.

Rain keeps time on his tarp that night.
He counts the drops,
measures how ownership fades.

°

Forest deepens, floor layered with silence.
Old mills stand reborn as galleries.
Progress hums softer now, traded for quiet admiration.
Bricks remain blackened, iron still clenched in place.

In Dalton he stops for pie and coffee.
The woman behind the counter asks if he’s through-hiking.
He nods.
She smiles: “Then you’re nearly whole.”
Outside, rain lifts from the street like breath leaving a body.

Fog greets him on Greylock.
Traffic whispers miles below,
proof that the world goes on whether witnessed or not.

°

Green Mountains breathe mist.
Sap and thaw scent the wind.
He follows a run of sugar shacks,
steps sinking into mud and memory.

Maple buckets hang from trunks.
He tastes a drop risen from root to mouth
clear, patient, older than language.
Somewhere beyond the ridge a saw hums,
the rhythm of endurance itself.

He walks through fern and stone foundation,
tools turned relics, stories rusted but present.
The mountain remembers every attempt.

°

Granite presses close.
The climb grows merciless, precise.
He leans into a wind that scrapes thought clean.

Above treeline, cloud drifts through him.
Each breath a contract between body and will.
Mount Washington waits ahead,
its summit nothing but weather.

He arrives raw and silent.
Fog wraps him whole.
Belonging feels this way—without view, without noise.

°

Forest returns, dense and certain.
Pine needles hush his steps;
lakes flash between trunks, brief as pulse.
He crosses bog boards slick with moss,
wood groaning under the weight of memory.

Rain fills moose tracks.
A loon calls once and is answered by distance.
He follows that sound until the trees open
Katahdin rising, gray, absolute.

The climb slows.
Each step equals a year.
At the summit, wind hollows him clean.
He lays a hand on the sign,
rough wood against worn skin.

He sits among boulders still warm from sun,
hands trembling from the climb.
All along this spine he has felt one heartbeat,
from Georgia clay to Maine granite,
a single body rising through the continent.

These hills carried the first footsteps of a nation
its hunger, hope, greed, grace.
Every coal vein, every buried river,
every bell that ever called a Sunday,
they are marrow now, part of one frame.

He understands now:
America was never built on land;
it was raised from it.
The Appalachians are its first skeleton,
ribs that hold its breath,
a spine that taught it to stand,
bone-deep memory that will not decay.

He presses his palm to the ground.
Warmth answers.
The mountain breathes beneath him,
and he breathes back.

 

[kreemi_pi]

Special Way
by Kreemi

There's a special way
You caught me, caught my eye

There's a special way
Like you didn't have to try

There's a special way
That you sent my spirit high

There's a special way
That you took me to the sky

There's a special way
so subtle, almost undercover

There's a special way
Went from strangers into lovers

There's a special way
That your body, it received me

There's a special way
Almost missed when you deceived me

There's a,special way
That you hurt me with your lyin'

There's a special way
You broke my heart and left me dyin'

 

[Xenofidelity78]

There is within all of us,
an inestimable ache to be remembered.
A hope that yearns on lingering wind to not pass into oblivion.
We take risk to walk from shadow into sun,
to be seen.
But just like Icarus,
we must take care
not to ruin our wings.

 

[Bn2f]

BEE


It need not had to have ended this way

I would have happily moved from out your space

Had you only said

Alas, the prick of Cupid’s point proved too much I’ve learned

My heart and my soul, my very skin now fire burns

I would have happily moved from out your way

Had you only said

You turn and leave without a word farewell

You die alone