Three Poems by A.J. Huffman

Showers & Flowers

Shock the mountains

purple.  Today

the sky started to cry,

but the desert only smiled.  Its reply:

a bloom, one hundred-year gestation,

a baby

to brighten the day.

Unplanted Seeds

sit, stagnant and rotting

in pouches labeled appropriately.  Irrelevant

bits of beginnings

wait for foraging fingers to pick

patches of earth, a burial site primed for rebirth. 

No such touch comes.

Shells shrivel, grow old.  With disuse

comes a death before death, a hanging

rack, a package yellowing in the sun.

Quarry

The scar was bigger than the sky

and twice as stunning,

changing in the light,

shining in the shadow.

This thin necklace of silvered

links stands to name this creation:

Of Another’s Hand.

A.J. Huffman has published twelve solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications), Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) and A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press) are now available from their respective publishers and amazon.com.  She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2400 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.