Poem of the Week By Lori Gomez
Biography:
Lori Gomez is the editor of VEXT Magazine and A Poetry Channel, a YouTube site dedicated to creating readings and short films for classic literature. As a poet, storyteller, spoken word artist, and essayist she has contributed her writing, videos and collages to various unsung online sites and journals. She was hatched in El Barrio, NYC then lived happily for three decades in San Francisco. She’s now immured on a beach in North Florida where she nebulously dwells as a sapiosexual, a daydream delusion, and the last living known relative of Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Backstory:
I have written about unrequited love since I was 5 years old and my abuelita’s 20 year old godson, Eddieberto, failed to accept my marriage proposal. This is just another in a long series of such outpourings.
One Burn, One Red, One Grin
I pluck a memory like
I would the petal from a daisy,
“He loves me… He loves me not…”
I won’t let a flower determine anything.
So… I choose, “He loves me.”
Against all common sense, in revolt against reason, against memory, my desire a fist – white hot – smashing Time’s clockface, hating the way it ignores my will and just keeps ticking and ticking, its clock hands nervously twitching, its clock voice muted but insistent, always quietly chiming, “Now. Now. Now.” in that low drone, dulling my synapses, lulling me into this walking sleep that just treadmills along. Hung-under. Stuck on the Nietzsche Channel. Reticulated robots. All of us. Trapped in the sands of its glass sphere… letting it snow its minutiae on us… every hour dissolving like snowflakes on our hot little tongues. Snowbound! Can’t you feel the enclosure? It circles me, it circles you, wrapping us all in our own chain of seconds, seconds… can’t you see? seconds… why isn’t it called firsts? it’s seconds… second choice… second best… irregulars… cheap bargain basement shit nobody wants… but buys because that’s all they can afford… goddamnit! don’t you understand? Each link on time’s chain is an iron-clad bond that we had nothing to do with forging. Slave to the clock, once divine spirits taking that tumble, fall down, devolving into idiot mobs. Karma slobs. But I see the flowers, the wildflowers growing in the cracks of the dome, letting the chaos in, the sweet sweet ungodly, the holy holy soil, the riot in the color where disorder sows it seeds, and even chained as I am here, I can just reach…. just… only just… my fingers stretched into spans of horizon, jazz hands doing their best Bob Fosse gyrating to a rhythm and music that time with its tone deaf ears will never hear. Fuck time, I’m searching the graves while the stars spin.
©2025 Lori Gomez