Search

Poetry Breakfast

Serving a little poetic nourishment every morning. Start your day with our new expanded menu. Poems, of course, are our specialty. But we will also be serving a fuller menu that includes poetry book reviews to feed poets' and poetry lovers' souls.

Open Search
Tag

poetry blog

Sidewalk Talk – A Poem by Shelby Lynn Lanaro

Sidewalk Talk
by Shelby Lynn Lanaro

What are your dreams?
you ask me puffing peach-mint
hookah smoke outside
the falafel house on Howe.

Where do you want to go
in the world?
What will be your legacy?

I’m not sure how to answer,
but I know the night is calm.
The air moves freely, not pushed
by wind, and the stars don’t feel

need to outshine streetlamps.
They’re content behind the curtain
of clouds, yet still shining; they know
they are, know their purpose.

And I’m content, sitting here,
not yet knowing mine.

 

About the Poet:  Shelby Lynn Lanaro is a narrative poet who uses life’s events to inspire her work. While many of her poems are based on her own life, Shelby enjoys taking on the voices of others to tell their stories through her poems. In 2017, Shelby earned her MFA in poetry from Southern Connecticut State University, where she has led several poetry workshops and now teaches Freshman English. Shelby’s poems have been published in Dying Dahlia Review and The Feminist Wire. One of Shelby’s poems will also appear in a forthcoming anthology by Stormy Island Publishing.

Where It Hides – A Poem by Samuel Oladele

Where It Hides
by Samuel Oladele

Follow the silence
into the heart of the scream,
the mouthless scream,
the monastery of all pain.

Anchoring on all souls pain lives;
a life without form, gorging all our greenness.

Follow the silence into the base where pain breathes,
where it towers above strength,
where it breaks the backbone of love.

Only those shackled by it know where light ends;
only they know the weight of darkness.

 

 

About the Poet:  Samuel Oladele is a Nigerian studying Applied Chemistry at Usmanu Danfodiyo university, Sokoto. Whenever he’s not thinking of making TNT or thinking about some industrial production processes, he reads and writes prose and poetry.

The Last Nest – A Poem by Tony Pena

The Last Nest
by Tony Pena

The cat didn’t leave much,
but enough feather on bone
to catch the jet stream
to the shore of every living
thing’s dream where dunes
offer up a bounty of cover
to pull twigs and wait out
the storm until the angels
chime in the chorus with lyrics
of building castles in the sand.

 

About the Poet:  Tony Pena was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate for the city of Beacon, New York.

Over the years some of his poems and fiction have found homes in Dogzplot, Full of Crow, Gutter Eloquence, Misfit Magazine, Poetic Space, Red Fez, Slipstream, The Dope Fiend Daily, The Rye Whiskey Review, Third Lung Review, Underground Voices, Working Stiff, and Zygote in my Coffee among other journals.

A volume of poetry and flash fiction, “Blood and Beats and Rock n Roll,” is available now at Amazon.

A chapbook of poetry, “Opening night in Gehenna,” is available from author.

Colorful compositions and caterwauling with a couple of chords can be seen at:
Www.youtube.com/tonypenapoetry
Www.facebook.com/tonypenapoetry
On Instagram as tonypenapoetry

Assertion – A Poem by Pamela Joyce Shapiro

Assertion
—after Ben Lerner
by Pamela Joyce Shapiro

Sometimes, I lose my pronouns pondering the possibilities of we.
Your she, diffident among peacocks and catastrophes, must
always please. Pinned beneath the weight of verbs, she asks if you recall
her noun, the long nights reading blind, some meaning in the hours of our.
Yours is a possessive without apostrophe. Fractured lines
blossoming across limb and mind, cloying adverbs in search of
passive phrases. Are you you outside of me? Persuasive verse
unravels uniformly, a fallen nest of morphemes like
promises forgotten. Syntax deceives, meter is faulty.
If it is any consolation, the reader never tires.

 

About the Poet: Pamela Joyce Shapiro is a cognitive psychologist intrigued by memory and language. She teaches psychology in Philadelphia and writes poetry to capture thoughts and moments otherwise forgotten. Her work has appeared in Poetry Breakfast, Better Than Starbucks, The Ekphrastic Review, Unlost, and One Sentence Poems.

Thin Spaces – A Poem by Karen Fox

Thin Spaces
by Karen Fox

There is a place
in each life
where we stand
with naked souls
and open minds.
Where time
has not been
discovered,
rocks turns to
crystal,
sky becomes
earth.

The veil is thin
there,
where shadows
of past and
future waltz
together becoming
our truth,
our very breath.

I touch them both
and am
grateful.

Karen Fox

The Edge of Memory – A Poem by Randal A. Burd, Jr.

The Edge of Memory
by Randal A. Burd, Jr.

His laughter still infects across the years,
Long absent since the days he was around–
The video conserves the cherished sound–
Distorted by effects of time and tears.

He occupies the edge of memory.
His ghost still haunts me when I least expect.
Yet, when I pause and try to recollect,
He hides in haze devoid of clarity.

So different than the person in my mind,
The one who now appears upon the screen
Objectively preserved, but seldom seen,
Is more authentic and far less refined.

I cannot trust my head to hold what’s dear;
My heart and time are sure to interfere.

 

About the Poet: Randal A. Burd, Jr. is a married father of two and an educator working on the site of a residential treatment facility in rural Missouri. Randal’s poems have recently been featured by The Society of Classical Poets, Vita Brevis, the Amethyst Review, and Nine Muses Poetry among other publications.

Blog – http://randalssanctuary.wordpress.com

Twitter – @ColonelRandal

Facebook – @awesomecopy

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: