Poets

Origami Microchap

Poems

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Cover collage by JanK

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Freed

She slips her neck chains,
heads for the Red Sea
where it’s dammed and
divided by Divine hands—
a victory over centuries
of wailing prayer.

Stones

Like threaded grooves of a clock screw,
ramps channeled rocks to build up walls.
She’s folding towels, a spire falls.
The centuries are not coming back.

Nothing lasts forever.
She shivers as CNN shows the fire.
Churches of trees will burn—
but only burial can melt the stones
when the earth takes back its own.

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*Feb 2020, Stick Figure Poetry
published a version of “Stones.”

Wisteria

Vines climb branches,
laddering leaves toward the sky
beside highways through open Georgia.

Tendrils hook their twining toes
around the twigs of Chestnut Oak. They invade,
it’s said. They pull down the Yellow Poplars.

Here on this land brushed with lavender poison,
her predecessors’ spirits still live in the roots.
Under draping grapes wrapping every thought
her tissues will rot when the forests collapse.

Storm

Inside the bruised universe, a beauty of welts
and dirt blood lullaby the moon.
From the firs come strained verses and tunes.

Fools in vain raise balloons to elsewhere realms,
muddy ruins the wind dunes seldom tame.

Eden

Out of the Garden rose joyful beings
who were later removed in mourning.

Down the valley a gale stirred the creek,
and flood waves uprooted the mountains.

Against the moon, the last rain drips from
her eaves like lace in the freshness of night.

Ascent

She is blessed in the royalty of
morning arrows dressed in linen
from afar and through the clouds.

She is born of stars,
flushed honey of light.
She is sky and its flight,
laughing gold-glow of joy.

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Catherine Zickgraf © 2022

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Cover collage by JanK

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Author's Note: Sept 2018,

Furtive Dalliance Literary Review

published these poems in print only.

This press is on indefinite hiatus.

Origami Poems is the perfect format.

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Ballerina

Into my window fall stars long as dreams, I slip through the screen.

Night grows a poem stretching prima toes to cross street then creek

stepping soft on the forest floor. Over shivering beds of dark stones,

the sparkle-moon follows me home.

Stereo          

Even through moon and drizzle, the train plumes billowing into the

clouds navigate my backyard valley. They vibrate my candle flame

until its last breath sifts out the window, when whistles trail off and

tracks flow into the starlight horizon.

Linens

The pines don’t drip with shadows behind our house, out of reach

of the streetlight. Past the creek line bordering our woods, the oak

leaves close their eyes. The creatures of the low sky hush us calm,

I’m returning my mind to its dream.

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Catherine Zickgraf  © 2020

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Cover collage by JanKeough

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may be printed, for free,
from this website.

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 1. Laundry

When the morning opens in its glory
and the bluebell sky comes alive,
clouds fly in like cotton shirts
on clotheslines across the blue.

So my pillowcases pinned across the line
go sailing toward the backyard pines
on rope around posts at the
edge of the world.

2. Dishes

My kitchen windowsill sprouts
buds of lantana, blue glories
around a skyline of jade vases,
a daisy pot holding
some watercolor brushes.

Soft vines lean their afternoon
shadows on bananas that curl
in Grandmom’s Wedgewood dish.
Her African violet above my sink
breathes in the window light.

3. Soup

I’ve dissolved the broth cubes,
set cans of tomatoes by the stove,
egg noodles, carrots-corn-peas,
wisps of onions.

When all my family gets home
I’ll fill them with the peace
that thickens the herbed air in the
waning sunset of my kitchen.

4. Bedding

A nocturne lures down its calm
in the evergreen heaven.
Night blankets us over.
We’re nested like robins.
We all fall silent like the sky.

5. Dream

Below the opal glow that hangs in the dark,
the moondial trees move through the ferns.
quiet of slow shadows - The night
and fallen pines litter railroad ties.
The branches are dry as ghosts of vines and
lost trains that go riding through the woods.

6. Sunrise

Again, the beginning,
the dim horizon spreads with glory.
In the newness of another morning,
gold falls over our summer comforter,
its cornflower blues bloom around us.
Past the curtains, the earth stirs
through drips of dawn on the leaves,
— finches in the trees
everything sings according to its nature.

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Catherine Zickgraf © 2019

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Cover: Rising Up Dawn

by Lauri Burke 

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(1)

We can mire ourselves in war.
We delight in our small mirth,
but our feet still pace like ants
on the lithic face of our Earth.

(2)

Long ago mornings, the whole world
falling beside her ear in drips of dawn
and leaf-breeze, birds filled the trees,
all things sang according their nature.

(3)

She tends her piles, maintaining them in
bundles that cover her floor and its land-
scape. She keeps bins of files from third
grade through grad school, draping them
in calico to make them her cotton tables.

(4)

She knows she is just one puzzle piece.
Earth’s living things number more than
its sand. Her stream is a strand against
the Nile’s width. But it is the lifeblood
of this tract. As greens thrive when it’s
stable, gulp in the flood, we all live so
small, melting in memories of the land.

(5)

Tapping another brush, the painter folds the
white wind into blue atmosphere and drags
paint across the canvas. She spreads out the
swift-moving sky that blew him home from
war and the guns, needing only his precious
wife and all their sweet-smelling little ones.

(6)

Where rivers scoop lakes at their estuaries,
the marble she holds is encasing the oceans.
Seeking the self inside, she is polishing the
sky’s eye. Pulling knotted rope up the river-
side, she swings into a long line of horizon.

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Catherine Zickgraf © 2017

Acrostic Joy

Acrostic Joy

We are years of light

When Everywhere Are Ripped Eyelids,
You Enter And Resolve, Stitching
Our Fingernails
Like Iridescent Gates. Hold Tight
When Emptiness
And Reminders Elevate
Yesterday. Eternity At Rest, Souls
Of the Faithful
Live In God’s Hidden Thoughts.·

from the soul of the sun.

Fear Rends Our Minds. To Heal, Each
Star Offers Us Lullabying Orchestras,
Freeing The Heart,
Ending Silence and Untouched Night.

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Catherine Zickgraf © 2017