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| Skyler Ewing |
Blackberry Heart
We humans are more likely to feel proud
of ‘our’ evolving consciousness
than of our foot-dragging, backward-looking
blackberry heart. Bittersweet, both at once
though the mix varies and often one predominates
and we won’t see its sweetness, its bitterness
for the woodfire glow of the one or the steely eye of the other.
Am I not the same person you loved last week?
Sadly not. Now I’m an incarnated irritant
disgustingly unwelcome. The flow we are deceives us
when considered static; even the Gulf Stream shifts,
the climate changes. Didn’t you notice my wandering eye,
gambling habit, moodiness, barely controlled diabetes?
Sometimes my twin brother visits and we switch places.
He’s a caramel fudge sundae, a seedless watermelon
just short of overripe, a winning lottery ticket,
an endless innovative lead guitar riff.
We have the same heart everyone does. Even you,
though we tend to see just one side of it at a time
and can’t sustain either. Otherwise, we’d all be saints
or demons, not mere humans.
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| Don Brandis |
Don Brandis lives quietly outside Seattle, reading and writing poems when they show up. He has a degree in philosophy and a long fascination with Zen. Some of his poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Black Moon Magazine, Blue Unicorn, Last Leaves, and elsewhere. A book of his poems, called Paper Birds (Unsolicited Press, 2021), is available. He hasn’t read your poems either, unless he did so without knowing they were yours.
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