late january
the creek runs low
showing stones
that used to be
anonymous
wet backs
shine
as though they have arrived
from another century
i think of names
i used to say
without effort
and cannot quite
reach now
the water keeps going
not needing
to remember me
#poetry
möbius heart
there is no back
there is only
after
there is no away
there is only
again
love is not a noun
it is geometry
a crossing
a sentence that turns
without turning away
a hinge
made of continuation
#poetry
the poem that cannot be written she looks for a doorway in language and finds only a mirror she did not ask for she turns it to the wall and begins again no hymn no lesson no clean arc only this a mouth trying not to take a distance that keeps paying itself to remain elsewhere what she knows is the sea exists and she cannot cross it what she knows is names exist then stop what she knows is her quiet is not innocence so she writes as one would set down a cup of water carefully on a shaking table
shoreline mind
thoughts arrive
without footsteps
they lay down
their small wet tokens
of want
of worry
and leave
I try
to follow them
but my mind is not a path
it is a shore
everything arrives
already turning back
and the water
never remembers
what it touches
#poetry
words
I say the words
slowly
they do not return
they only change
the shape
of my mouth
each one
a small spell
that opens
into air
#poetry
the far Meridian not here not there the line is not a line only the difference between before and after i have stood on it without knowing the world did not change except the light fell differently on my shoulder the wind kept moving through the branches and something in me shifted without a sound as if i had crossed into a country with no name what i love is still here leaving -Gerhard Oevermann 2026
The Far Meridian
#poetry
Thank you, Teddy Ann!
Howl I love this filthy shining era this era of electric grief of possibility and protest glitter on bruises mutual aid and mutual surveillance I love the kids with their sharp compassion their pronouns like bright keys their refusal to be flattened tenderness turned weapon laughter in the teeth of the machine I love the workers who hold up the world with wrists that ache I love the teachers I love the nurses I love the baristas making a thousand small mercies under LED suns and I hate - the bored cruelty of money how it buys silence how it turns the future into a gated community how the poor are handled like a rumor like a clerical error like a lesson but I am not here to be pure I am here to be alive to say the names of what is happening to praise what survives to howl a little in the key of the street -unknown poet 2026
Howl
#poetry
Photo of moonlight shining through a cloudy night sky.
some part of me waited
for the sky to open
as if revelation were a thing
that needed clearing
I’ve learned not to chase clarity
some truths are meant to blur
like moonlight through clouds
or the outline of your face
in a dream I wake too soon from
#poetry
The Bear Lives in the Suburbs Now
he walks the cul-de-sac
after midnight
past sprinklers and backlit TVs
he remembers glaciers
but eats from compost bins
and sometimes
dances shirtless at the club
a kid once called him
the ancestor
he nodded
street corner siren
cuts clean through my private thoughts
like a knife through tape
i feel your eyes look over me
and i don’t look down
#tanka
first dawn, wolf colored
in the treeline of the town
no wolf - just the urge
to bite through my own excuses
and drag the year home
bonfire in the yard
sparks climb like small fox-spirits
into cold heaven
#haiku
Yule snow comes down in patient flakes and hushes road and rail the hedges wear their thorny lace the night grows broad and pale i go where pines make narrowing aisles and resin sweet as prayer a bonfire speaks in fox-red tongues to whoever still comes there holly gleams like struck-up blood oak stands dark and true the old songs rise without a book and find their way right through they say the year has two fierce kings one leaf and bark, one bone and on this night the green one turns and gives the dark its throne i hold my hands above the fire as embers fly like seed the dark is not a wolf tonight but something i can feed -Gerhard Oevermann 2025
Yule
#poetry
Solstice the sun is least the fields are still the sky turns slate the air turns chill and frost begins its quiet art to etch its iron into hearts i walk where hemlocks crowd the lane their needles black with resin-rain the last light thins a dimming thread then slips behind the ridge and is dead they say tonight the old ones near soft-footed drawn by stove and cheer so offerings set on sill and plate a small respect for what may wait out in the woods the white stag moves no sound beneath his hidden hooves his antlers hold a frozen gleam as if the dark itself can dream and in that stillness i understand the world obeys a quiet hand no hymn no bell just this release the light turns back the dark will cease -Gerhard Oevermann 2025
Solstice
#poetry
bus stop with the Fates
plastic bench, cold rain
schedule eaten by mildew
buses not on time
three old women wait
one knits, one counts, one keeps still
eyes on passing cars
whichever I board
they nod once and snip the air
as if at a thread
#haiku
committee of mirrors
sometimes I vanish inward
and hear my thoughts unspool
as though I am not singular
rather a committee of mirrors
convened in the dark
voting in silence
one remembers
one invents
one forgives
or refuses to
the majority wins
and I step back into the room
you never notice
seasonal darkness
and my thoughts grow longer teeth
than they deserve
#haiku
a cardinal’s flash
through gray - like sudden insight
that won’t stay long
#haiku
Lord of Winter the first snow comes as a messenger not loud not hurried a pale hand laid upon the world to hush the bramble and the road in the hemlock’s deeper shade something older than memory leans near the bark and listens as an old god listens the creek goes black beneath its ice a sealed throat still singing and in that glass I think I see the antlered lord of winter lift his crown of frost and pass without a sound there are stories in the smoke that do not come from wood old women stirring porridge and stirring weather with the same spoon till the wind grows sharp and the moon keeps her distance the fox runs clean a liturgy along my fence’s iron ribs and each small print he leaves behind is written like a charm against the forgetting of the far fields I have heard the pines at midnight trade rumors with the stars of hollow kings beneath the hills and brides of snow unburied and a pale mare that drinks the dark from every thawing ditch yet nothing frightens me so much as how the world agrees to be remade in white to take the cold as sacrament to let the familiar doorstone turn strange beneath my boot so I go out with bread and salt as my grandmother told me and set them on the sill for whatever walks the orchard when the owls have ceased their counting and the last lamp holds its fire if it should come that quiet guest I will not ask its lineage I will not speak of saints or sin only hold my hands open and learn at last what winter wants of me
Panthers on the Ridge We buried her up on the ridge, where the hay grass lays itself flat like it knows how to listen, and the mountain keeps its mouth shut out of politeness, or practice. I came down with red clay on my shoes and her last home under my thumbnail, and I thought about all the women who learned to make do with a sink full of cold water and a future that never stayed put. I’ve got a mark on my skin now- not pretty, not clever, just proof I was there when the singing went thin and the dirt took over. And at night, when the road goes quiet and the trees start leaning in, I swear I can feel it up high where the switchbacks end. The panthers move in the dark like a decision you finally make- the clean freedom of knowing your teeth, the honest law of hunger, and how it doesn’t apologize. I look at my hands and ask them to change, for the nails to mean something, for my spine to remember it was once a ladder. My father sits on the porch with his old ghosts laid out beside him, one for each year he wouldn’t name. He says he stayed too long, like staying is a kind of love, like leaving is a sin. His face is weathered into the shape of an omen, his pride into the shape of a bruise, and when the sun drops behind the line of pines, he watches it like it might not come back and part of him hopes it won’t. But I keep watching the light like it’s ink and I’m paper, like there’s still a story I can pry loose from this place if I don’t flinch. The panthers move in the dark, that old, bright pressure in the blood. I practice my bite in the mirror. I file my fear down to a point. I scrape at the wall we call home until the wall starts giving up. And if you see me on the road at daybreak, headed out past the last mailbox, don’t wave like it’s casual. Don’t ask where I’m going. Just listen, real close, to the ridge behind you. There are big cats up there, learning their own ways again and again, & they don’t ask permission to be free. -Gerhard Oevermann 2025
I love this imagery.
Awesome.
The Nebula there is a nebula behind my eyes a slow weather of light made from what I keep and what I cannot keep here drifts the smell of my father’s workshop oil and iron and an afternoon that never ended here drifts my grandmother’s voice after she forgot the word for my name here drifts the room where someone left and I told a joke to avoid the sentence we both already knew all of it turning without decision sometimes a single image falls into the cloud a blue cup on a white tablecloth the shape of your hand when you reached for mine the sound the door made the last time my father came home before my mother left him fragments gather like gravity gathers dust around them the unfinished days begin to glow as if they had been waiting but it is only the nebula failing once more at becoming a star there are also the lives that did not happen the child we almost had who appears from time to time at the edge of sleep the version of my sister who did not listen to politicians not qualified to give health advice the self who spoke on the night when i stayed quiet their outlines are faint but they persist when I turn away they become weather when I listen they feel like relatives in the nebula nothing is entirely dead nothing is entirely born astronomers say a nebula is grave and nursery a place where collapse and beginning share the same dust if that is true then i am not a single life i am the region where many lives have fallen apart a sky inside the skull where memory and forgetting keep changing roles a drifting brightness that once believed it was a single star and still for reasons it does not know continues to shine on the way out -Gerhard Oevermann 2025
The Nebula
#BornBattleReady #Nebula #poetry #writing
Like a Rumor i once believed that morality required an origin story a thunderclap a commandment a mountain now i suspect it requires only attention the courage to notice that our decisions do not vanish when we make them they remain they move outward through other lives like a rumor they return years later wearing a new name asking again what we meant -Gerhard Oevermann 2025
Like a Rumor
#poetry
The Hunter in Winter i’ve watched orion since childhood like returning to a familiar paragraph each winter it repeats with calm authority the three stars of the belt are not three stars they are a proof that arrangement can outlast desire i once believed i was tracking him but it’s possible that he finds me selects me from the crowded dark and says quietly remember ptolemy wrote him down as if the sky were a library and the hunter an index entry but a catalog is only another kind of myth a way to pretend the infinite has margins i know now that the pattern is not the thing the lines we draw are our invention the names rigel betelgeuse small fees paid to distance so it might speak back but still the figure persists not on the page but behind the page where sight becomes thought and thought becomes a room sometimes i imagine a second orion not in the sky but in me a hunter made of withheld hours half-said sentences and the bright untouchable animals i’ve pursued through my life each clear night i look up and the old geometry answers with patient contradictions it’s the same and it’s never the same because i’m the variable the moving earth under the fixed story the reader who changes while the sentence stays orion doesn’t promise meaning he only keeps returning and in that return i recognize that repetition is a form of mercy and patterns are how the universe lets us think we are not lost -Gerhard Oevermann 2025
memory is the library
where the books write the reader
each page turning me
into the hand
that will later close it
#poetry #gogyohka
A Map of All the Roads Not Taken
i drew a map of regrets
the lines would not hold
each road led to another fork where I turned back
then forward again
chasing a version of myself
that knew which path
was only meant to be imagined
#poetry