James Stryker Mott 1921-2003

I wanted to write about you. 

But the words that I want to say feel too contrived, even this.  You know how you have a certain way of talking with people, in general?  I know how I talk to Mom, and I know how to talk to my friends.  But I can't seem to find a way to talk to you.  I guess, in the end, I realize that listening to you was my favorite thing, and often I when I think of you, it's the stories you told.  And the support, always and forever the support, and I can't think of a way to express myself.  I feel the wrong words choke the right ones as they try to struggle out, and I could swallow my tongue and be more eloquent.  There is an ease of speaking that I had when I was little, when I spoke like I did then, however that was.  I don't have that ease now.  Now, every word is set up against impossible standards to be perfect.  I don't feel the perfection, the natural flow.  It's like when they talk about how dialogue isn't written the way people speak, but the way people speak is written like dialogue, and I get confused between the two; and I can't find the voice I want to use, because the voice you heard and you knew has changed, and sometimes it's better that way, but mostly it's harder, and that makes the barrier wider and deeper than ever before.  There's nothing to say really, because I can't find the right words, but I feel like despite that, you would still understand me.  We would still eat my brownies and remember when we went swimming and butternut crunch ice cream afterward, and watch the birds and say all those funny names. 

I think there's a part of me, somewhere hidden, that knows it's just for me and you anyways, and it never was for them. 


~Olivia

Holding Out For A Hero

In the passé way in which everything that you do is done,
I've seen you answer the phone, and although the answer
was much expected to your age-old question of hello,
I still feel that it was unfair of you to laugh. 

Then, when days pass, and I see you, after the cars in your
driveway have been gone for weeks, kneeling by yourself,
with your hair – all yellow and red – yanked back in one of
those ponytail holders that has been stretched to the limit,
I know it is unfair of me to smile. 

But seeing you so human, after too long, has that
effect on me. 



~Hammeh

Where is your warrent?

Beneath the Delaware,
there is a fish. 

Holding the sun out,
the fish sees the glisten
of beams and blurs of
dazzling light,

and aquamarine that turns gold
in sunlight,
of violet in moonlight,
and the strange off-tint of
reds that flash in scales. 



The bow of the water,
and the light of the glassy eyes. 
This fish is old.



~Hammeh

Oceania and Koalas

Crossing the border
between your world
and mine used to be
so much easier. 

But it's like reading
prose like poetry,
or poetry like prose.

It can mean one thing
– a near perfect kiss –
and come out meaning
the complete opposite
– a drawn out sigh – 
of simple antipathy, 


or worse: apathy.



~Hammeh

Melon Regatta

"Where has the horse gone?  Where has the rider gone?"

An innate sense of fear,
in the blood,
the taste of salt water and the
gritty salve of sand,
answer is hidden.

Her work is meaningless.
His critique was heartless.

But in survival, in the details,
there is no perfect yes or no,
no sudden, simple way of writing,
and becoming lost in the words
as they blur on the page and couple
together, holding back nothing, and
making no sense,
this is how we hold on to humanity. 


~Hammeh

Cinnamon Spice

Hiding between the high-strung lines of a sonnet,
and the                soft
    easy         waves          of
a              page
         of
          free
              verse,

there lies the answer to my question;

about why we don't fit, like the rough pieces of a villanelle
or the rigid lines of a haiku EXPLODING
with NATURE and emotion. 

Sometimes, I find
the answer is exactly
what I needed.



~Hammeh

An Orange Debacle

A Measure of Happiness

I think that there's a token bit,
in the curve of a tongue and the swell
of a cheek, of happiness, however hard
it may be to suffer through finding it,
the question of quality and worth is
always evident, regardless of the immeasurable
or yard-stick quality this bit provides; and in the
end, do we find it because we are so desperate
or because we have truly suffered, and, inevitably:

will it last?





~hammeh

In Words and Pictures Told

Missed Meanings

Dodging the edge of a poem,
her eyes cross – like God's eyes,
and she flips over like the tail of a coin.

Jammed between the pages of Hard Times
is a bent in half bookmark, with watercolor beetles,
who swarm and reproduce by millions,

amassing inside the book like so many stars as
freckles on her Irish face.  Their wings flutter with
a disobedient discontent, and her arms

swing with the hope that running farther,
running faster will disband the weight around
her waist.  But it doesn't seem as though

her weight or the beetles or the tail side of the coin
will ever feature in the ineffable plan, and somewhere
she is drinking an evening glass of water and tucking

herself in at night.


~hammeh