Five Poems by J.D. Isip

 

Imagine


Your head here, right on my chest – ba dum,
You hear my heart like a drum tap – ba dum,
Imagine us in our luckier twenties, you’re thrumming
your fingers against my skin, my heart – ba dum, ba dum


This braggadocio tells you to stay – ba dum,
This chest is for arrows and bullets – ba dum,
Imagine I’m Captain America, juiced on super soldier serum
surging through my righteous veins – ba dum, ba dum


You smiled, then you laughed, here – ba dum,
When you asked what I called this – ba dum,
Imagine I’m Superman, I said, and this is my Fortress
of Solitude, too honest in our thirties – ba dum, ba dum


Your head here, still here, I think – ba dum,
You hear me say what I should have – ba dum,
Imagine me wiser than I was at forty, saying what I didn’t,
what I thought you understood, here – ba dum, ba dum


There’s nothing else here, just echoes – ba dum,
No super soldier, no bullet proof skin – ba dum,
Imagine, wherever you are, someone you might’ve, might…
imagines your fingers against my skin – ba dum, ba dum

 

Frog and Toad Are Friends

for Arnold Lobel

 

In the brown-green forest of cattails and snails
wandering past a diminutive fence, the final slat
swinging, sit two friends chatting.

 

Two friends chatting about a dragonfly one saw
skip the pond showing off how one might cause
a ripple, make a stir. Toad can’t

 

bring himself to touch the water, so he stirs sugar
in his tea, and listens to his friend, his buoyant friend
always nearby, always within reach.

 

“I really don’t quite know what I’m doing,” Frog
confessed once, and Toad replied, “Some part of you
knows.” But his friend thought, “No, really not.”

 

There were hikes, small adventures, silences. Frog
left a note telling his friend, “I want to be alone”
and Toad took a turtle to find him.

 

The turtle asked, “Why don’t you leave him alone?”
Do you say, without a friend, this world is too much
for me? No, not a friend. Without Frog.

 

Frog sitting out there on a rock, watching a dragonfly,
like the one his friend was so enamoured with, just
a touch will disturb the still waters.

 

Impressionism


Don’t you think this should have more hue,
wisteria spilling over a slatted trellis, a view
onto a placid body of water coated in sunlight,
boats full of lovers lazily craning, finding its


depths within, catching their breath and one
another’s hand, bright strokes over the lonely
years and fear the picturesque can only exist
at the edge of lakes, at shores, in the wistful


backward glance, leaving town for the weekend,
off to college, a charm and promise to friends
to keep in touch, the ache in knowing you won’t
know the faces or names or what you had thought


in blonde and auburn, in azure and sapphire, in ivy
vines and fresh-cut baseball diamonds, in living
on a painted world before it was framed, before ages
of light leeched each fine feature and lines of faces?

The Walking Dead

 

Scrabble along past the Iranian couple breaking in the garage
his cigarette smoke trailing away from the dip and moan of her, past wood
burning in the first snow and the second-floor neighbour gabbing, crackling
here in the cold, closed-off community of what is left of us


Sue says her son sent a card last month, it’s up on the fridge,
her grands posing by pumpkins, he didn’t even sign it, it’ll be a long winter
she or Arturo say with no certainty, just something to fill the silences
one might stock with updates or happenings, but nothing happens


Here it is the last gold and amber leaves, the sized-down rental,
the husband loading boxes, dodging his hopeless wife who keeps reaching out
even as I walk past, even as I look up and catch his face, and he is smiling
because there are the leavers and there are the losers. And the walkers.

 

Sharks in the Streets


They came with the hurricane winds
there under stoplights, city streetlights
in the asphalt currents past the minnows
of garbage and hoi polloi, their fins surface


And you hear the Jaws theme
the two dropping notes
that have chased you
from childhood


from each shore
from Tarshish
from God
so far from God


So far you went
So far
until the men came harried
crying out into the wind


their arms pointing, mouths agape
How can you sleep? they asked
Pray to your God! they screamed
There are sharks in the street!


And you stood up and said
Throw me to those sharks!
To the wolves!
To the men outside!
Throw me into the teeth of my God!

J.D. Isip’s full-length poetry collections include Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His third collection, tentatively titled I Wasn’t Finished, will be released by Moon Tide Press at the end of 2024 or early 2025. J.D. teaches at Collin College in Plano, Texas, where he lives with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.

J.D. Isip, PhD

Professor of English

Twitter: @JDIsip

Facebook: J.D. Isip

Instagram: @j.d.isip