Writers Corner for June 10, 2011

Share your writing with the world. Do it here.

Send your Writers Corner submissions to Maureen Dolan, [email protected].

We prefer e-mail submissions, and we ask that you limit the length of your stories and poems. Please include your hometown with your submission.

You can send hard-copies by mail to Maureen Dolan at The Press, 201 Second St., Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, 83814.

And now, we present more poems, stories and essays written by you, our readers.

•••

Too Far the Dead

I find you like a tombstone

Your soul is the color of elephant skin

and pitted like old stone and

just as cold.

You are half buried in the dark and

oily soil of the some hill

in Pennsylvania.

You are stuck in open wounds

blood has moistened and

thickened the ground around you.

Your thoughts crawl up like

graveyard ivy,

Black veins

grow and creep in

from toe to soul

and liver to lung

like the filth that

ate your firstborn daughter.

And then

those weeds metastasize and

crawl into that

morning in the spring

when your youngest daughter

spilled herself onto the ground

with thick, gray mush and tiny bits

of skull and bone

where she kissed the barrel of a .38.

While I beg for your release from

their dry grasp and bony prison,

and I stretch my hand across the miles

to lift you from the ground

You remain a tombstone

and tell me softly like a whisper,

it is too far to the leave the dead.

- Jeff Langford, Rathdrum

•••

The busy poet

I try to write a poem each week,

but often when I try,

a drain is plugged or hinges squeak,

or laundry didn't dry.

The fence could use a coat of paint,

the lawn is long again,

the windows are her main complaint,

or maybe it's the den.

So off I go to make things right,

but then I need supplies,

I'll write a list; no pen in sight,

my temper starts to rise.

So now I'm off to find a pen,

and paper for the list,

the things I need are up to ten,

has anything been missed?

I'm ready now to make my run,

I grab the keys to go,

my wallet's gone and that's no fun,

why is it always so.

Perhaps I need to get away,

where I can simply rhyme,

where chores and lists and all dismay,

can wait another time.

- Jeff Simonson, Kellogg