The Literary Review
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Escape
Born in your first waking breath
before sanitation trucks crunching sound
makes garbage of, pixelates and
uploads to your computer, before
you even know, can’t humpty dumpty back
together, a number you’ll spend your whole life
protecting from every one that follows,
especially two you’ll crave and fear who’ll
Siamese the life out of you
cat tail around and eliminate;
thinking that two is better than one
try to make a go of what no
longer exists, only you don’t know it
not yet, and what chance do you
a skinny androgynous stick with
no curves have against how
two ties you up in itself,
and just when you’ve gotten used
to being hijacked
- Linda Lerner
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Escape—(2)
two pulls a fast one, drags in three
those terrible 3’s pulling you
into a raging tornado like twister
backgrounded by a sun-like calm,
makes no sense, and you try
to wake back up into yourself,
take a deep breath to get out
of this fake scene when
four pretending to be a new number
is discovered in a fun house mirror
your computer screen has become,
two keeps popping up in pairs
no matter where you look,
how far your fingers walk,
threatened storms of
a climate change crash already
in the works if you go on which
five is pressing you to do,
but just up ahead 6 is getting ready
- Linda Lerner
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Escape—(3)
to brand you with an X from
which there’ll be no escape
you stop short rear ending the number
behind causing a pile up collision:
The screen goes black;
a breath let go, a life retrieved
- Linda Lerner
March poem, 2022
today, I needed to see something come up through
the dirty, twig strewn winter earth, break out
of a crack in the sidewalk, for this unlikely
March sun, to seed a piece of earth caged
around trees I passed on almost every block\year
of my life, today, when the whole earth is
being threatened, needed to see beyond
narrow definitions of sprout, crocus
and sighting only wrapped bunches of flowers
outside fruit stores, interchangeable as all those
groups I’ve been part of over the years,
a sign inside another store’s flower display
reads, don’t touch, they’re real…not real enough
I needed to touch, feel the living warmth
of alive, when getting a request from
an editor asking for information about a man
I loved, long gone…like bulbs replanted
that keep flowering…
that night, on the news I watched one
courageous human being
- Linda Lerner
March poem, 2022—(2)
rise up thru bomb bursting blood shed
undeterred: what comes unbidden
from the earth, this planet
- Linda Lerner
Hurt
About the beauty that surrounded him, particularly the moon Coleridge wrote: “I see them all, so excellently fair; / I see not feel how beautiful they are!” From “Dejection Ode”
felt like a door slammed in her face,
no reason, she said, hurtful another told me
of what she too…
eating food spiced to hurt she didn’t feel
burned in my mouth, didn’t remember
doing to someone what they’d done to her
tries not to feel what hurt too much
to think about, all of us on the edge
of a bad time we’re not quite out of
nerves crippled by what we’d
been through seek out even spicier food,
war news happening elsewhere
to inch past mind, rid what’s
spreading among us like a bug
- Linda Lerner
Hurt—2.
just as the virus, which hurt so many
out of being, is receding,
that’s life, she said,
to say something when
there’s nothing
- Linda Lerner