Val Morehouse

Val Morehouse Poems

• Winter People
  Faces of natives turn inward like talk in uncertain throats. Small replicas of life eclipse
• Waiting For The Folks
  Who am I? Why, you’re Mama. No, I am not. I am your daughter. Stop foolin’ me!
• Life Story
  There is something raw in the taking, an ordinary sadness that blackens in the bottom of the cup. Here a fly is swatted,
• Liberator
  Like a lover he enters my life, carrying his dark purpose into the bedroom. Each thing opens to him like a map.
• Soliloquy
  Inside the morning this heart is a gong announcing your presence. See? This skin of mine is but a sheaf of pale wheat, ripened to nourish another’s need.
• Healed
  With knives he carves my woman’s flesh into new peaks and valleys, cuts out the center of rebellion, that audacity of dysfunction,
• Machete
  _________For William, who performed this ritual... Sealed with gases vivid as a flock of monarchs,
• Ritual Sunday
  ….“We hoped to gently persuade you book-review lovers to head online in search of our missing Book Review page…” The Contra Costa Times.
• Hunter (Haiku)
  Dawn's red cap early over silver spoor tracking dewprints of the moon.
• Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child
  ____version from a traditional slave spiritual, circa 1860’s...
• Icarus' Feathers
  We will know and remember with the inferno in our hearts, the day a devil’s passport was stamped: “Return to sender.”
• Cave Painting
  In dim coolness, underground, punctuated by the dropp and whine of the elevator I cut open boxes and stock tomorrow’s shelves.
• Bessie Ogilvy
  Crackle of sun stranded in blue glass she waits in that white house so old her breath haunts the cold
• Poisoned Apple
  “It is also well known within the nuclear power industry, that minor accidents occur on a regular basis due to human error or purposeful sabotage.”___ Kevin Briggs, Director, U.S. Disaster Preparedness Institute,2001. Complacency is its trigger. “Clean” its alias. Money its game.