“Naked in a Hurricane” © John Engstrom

 

This not erasure poetry!

real life grimmer
than Grimm Brothers
fairy tales

America steeled
against my foreign lover—
expatriation

robin forgot
spring
isn’t summer

alone by the spring
I cry
with the earth itself

morning butterflies
require meditation
to becalm flutters

at nightfall sun
demands clouds give way
to other stars

from ashes
wood dragons respire
jungles

sky sets so low
it seems to ask if it may
join us

streams rush
beside the hot spring—
must it rain today?

dry tropical figs
exploding seeds—
confidence

sudden monsoon
drenches the field for rice but
the farmer still hoes

tides shift as she shakes
the heavy young coconut
chops its top and pours

forest beekeeper
offers me a straw to taste
honeycomb

latent forever
lamented the lotus seed—
its flower patient

I should sink beneath
these blues but for…
hue

 

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. He edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.

John Engstrom is a Boston-based artist-author-poet. A retired journalist-museum worker, he serves as Arts critic for the Fenway News. His collages and poems appear on Facebook and Divergents Magazine.