Chris Tusa Poems

The sky is falling.
And Henny Penny is nowhere to be found.

There is no bright blue cartoon sky,
...

She looks rather pathetic, really,
leaning against the black air,
the three mangled fingers of her left hand
clutching a yellow purse,
...

Imagine a tiny black flower,
the nurse says,
blossoming in your spleen.
...

Another tornado warning, power lines
down, the same ring around the rosy.
But there’s no pocketful of posies
for this black plague in my brain.
...

Do not speak of that dreadful day in Cypress
when you stroked the green air
and my charcoal silhouette blushed.
Or of the black sky, how it swallowed
...

The earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was on the face of the deep.
-Genesis 1: 2
...

Someone stole Satan’s hipbone
and flung it against the sky.
Now you ride the orange horizon,
a stunned, wingless bird
...

You stand in the gray air,
your face a mirror reflecting
the dark shadows of trees.
Clouds drift in the brown water
...

I sill remember my father, on Sunday nights,
When he dressed up and played magician,
smiling as he pulled bright blue handkerchiefs
from the tiny white mouth of his fist,
...

for Leigh Mayeaux, whose body was never found.


Maybe he straddles you in the soft mud,
...