Five Poems by Michael J. Kolb

 

Ashlight 

 

Evening bends the yard,   

        color seeps from the grass.   

On the back step, lilies collapse,   

    stalks brittle,   

                ghosts of their own weight.   

 

A few lights lift,   

        falter,   

            return,   

    fireflies faint as names   

                that blister the tongue when spoken,   

        their glow scribbling the air   

            like flashes from frayed wire.   

 

I too once flared like this,   

        burning at dusk’s edge,   

   brief sparks, restless   

                for the dark that waits.   

 

Now night gathers us,   

        not with words,   

    but what glow remains,   

                a stubborn ember    

         the shadows   

                cannot smother.

 

 

Pain, A Seasoned Thief 

 

My pain, 
a seasoned thief, 
slips past each question, 
palms the evidence, 
leaves me empty-handed. 

 

The doctor holds the scan. 
I do not. 
We’ll keep watching he says, 
as if a gaze could 
suture what’s broken. 

 

So I turn to the river. 
Not for solace, 
only for its refusal 
to stop. 

 

The current hums 
like a song half-remembered, 
forever leaving, 
never gone. 

 

A heron unspools its body, 
shadow folding to wing. 
Water doesn’t pause 
to admire. 

 

I step between stones. 
They do not care 
if I fall. 

 

The body recalls 
a rhythm older than medicine, 
older than answers, 
older even than pain.

 

 

Medusa 

 

Surgery split me. 
I came out changed. 

 

Serpent-crowned, 
fluorescent, 
under glass. 

 

Tubes snake my skin. 
Machines stand guard, 
not to heal 
but to tame. 

 

They call it recovery. 
I call it return 
that never came. 

 

The seam remains. 
A miracle, they said. 
But the beast 
is not gone.

 

 

Brief Sparks Against the Dark 

 

Not lightning, not flame, 
not even the stone’s strike answered in sparks. 

 

A face half-seen, a voice slipping past sleep, 
a song nearly whole then gone. 

 

The body endures on afterlight, 
small bursts dissolving as soon as they flare. 

 

Still I hoard them, brief sparks against the dark, 
not to guide, only to keep moving. 

 

 

Not That Kind of Green 

 

The doctor said I was stable. 
Like a table: 
flat, hard, 
good for holding 
other people’s junk mail. 

 

Like a stone: 
cool, unmoving, 
something to trip on 
or stub your toe against. 

 

Like a tree: 
upright, 
photosynthesizing, 
if coffee counts as sunlight. 
Roots hidden, 
tangled in old socks. 

 

Green with envy? 
No. 
Just a little queasy. 

 

Not the kind of green 
of sunlight, 
but the kind that comes 
from undercooked chicken, 
from spinning too long in a desk chair, 
from the back of the fridge 
where vegetables 
never dared to go.

Michael J. Kolb is a poet, liver transplant survivor and anthropologist living in Denver.

His work has appeared in Third Wednesday, Sky Island Journal, Eunoia Review, Defenestration, San Antonio Review, Speckled Trout Review, and Moss Piglet, among others. He shares his writing on Instagram @michaeljkolb and at

substack.com/@michaeljkolb.