August 2021
Scott Waters
scottishwaters@yahoo.com
Bio Note: I am a poet and songwriter living in Oakland, California with my wife and son. I got an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State in 1995, and did absolutely nothing with it until poetry began to leak out of my pores in 2015. Since then my various leakages have been published in Main Street Rag, The Blue Nib, and many other journals, and I published my first chapbook, Arks, with Selcouth Station Press in May 2021.

Unquiet

The house is quiet.
Lightning crackles 
inside the dome
of this skull,
a trillion branches
of memory
and judgment,
highways travelled
and exited,
faces rising like fog
from the fields,
words that slipped
from the bog of my mouth,
sticky with consequences,
mornings drooped
like a dead lily
over a bowl of cereal,
regrets and fears 
shaken over
yesterday’s wounds,
the self I never showed
to anyone, not even
to myself.

Swung

This poem was supposed 
to hang its jacket
on a National poetry month prompt

but a sweet 2/4 jazz number
swung out of the car radio

honeycomb sax
tin can keyboards
sizzling drums

my foot started tapping on the mat
knees knocking 
against the steering wheel
grin wriggling across my stupid face

and I lost my grip
on the poem
spun it somewhere 
into the bushes
outside my parked car

I hope you
will forgive me.
©2021 Scott Waters
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