July 6, 2018

Three Poems by L. Liam Spradlin: "Unclaimed", "Yesterday's Coffee" and "Brown Silk"

S. Liam Spradlin writes poetry and fiction. His love for poetry has found a resurgence and he began writing poetry again in the recent months. His works have appeared in Sequoya Review, The Scarlet Leaf Review, Weasel Press, Dissident Voice, and Tuck magazine. He lives in Tennessee.






Unclaimed

Your words come as mist.
Soft
fragrance of angel's bloom. Rapture.
Trumpeting in side my lungs . Your neck
leaves the corner pillow .
Warm
with lavender I breathe you. Tulips
lie across your naked
shoulder
Dipping beneath unfinished
dreams
I shape my arms around you.
Only
with fingerprints I touch your
sleepy
hair. Rain between us now.
Silk
drowns our shaded
windows.
A splenetic sky kicks lightning
down
the alley. Below I count
seconds
between booming rooftops.
Still. You are not
Disturbed.




Yesterday’s Coffee

My father keeps old coffee
grounds in a tin can.
His proof of yesterday's pot full.
Such are the vaults of time.
Just a small sediment.
A memory. Scooped in a basket.
Saturated by tears .
Filtered by actions.
Never to be made over again.
The coffee pot sits empty
Only the grounds remain.
I started keeping them today




Brown Silk

Corners become cobwebs. Straw bristles fall from a sawed broom handle. Front curtains haven’t been pushed fully open in years. A blue film from a gas heater with four stacks burning keeps the otherwise inviting windows dismal. Everything looks blue from where he sits anyway. House faces east, deflects more light than it absorbs. A tin plate with a picture of a small island of snow settled trees covers the hole where the old wood stove piped its glaze through the ceiling chimney-I still remember stacking wood “eight feet long and four feet high.” During summers when silk turned brown on the ready corn he would let me roll it up in pieces of a paper grocery bag and smoke it. On those days I imagined my own Marlboro man.


S. Liam Spradlin



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