John Bellinger has been writing poetry on and off for a number of years, and has lived all his life in Central New York. He has been published in Small Pond Magazine, as well as Seasons, Poetpourri, BloodrootZ (online), and The Comstock Review (the latter of which he is currently the Associate Managing Editor).

Tonight,
Tonight

You've
pushed me
up against
a wall,
with no
shelter
from the
westward
rain, and
nothing
that i say
will fit
the box
in which
you have
composed
my life
when black
bites blue,
percussive
beneath
the pummel
of love,
meeting
the face
of this,
your
brought-
home
angel, nearly
out
in the cold
of your own
back-yard
without
the sweet
of honey, lost
and lost behind
the fabulous
burnishing moon.

by John Bellinger

all rights reserved

---

Fallen

Fallen
down
the tree
of humble
origin,
and we forget,
somehow,
the things
from which
we have
constructed
god:
the blind
unforgiving
dark,
the bright blue
question
in the eyes
of the least,
and at last
the gray mount
of morning,
the sun
behind
the limbs
of olive trees.

Offered here
is the prayer
of the wind,
dry
through grass
in bluest summer;
here
is the answer
come long
with the rain,
with the hands
of women,
grinding corn
in bowls of stone,
grinding ages
into years,
years
into days
of hands,
days
into dust,
into meal,
replacing hunger
with tomorrow
and summer long
questions
with milk
and the singing
of rain.

by John Bellinger

all rights reserved

Poetry by John Bellinger

---

A season of rain, poured



through a hammock of minutes,
leaving two days of water
prevailed upon the garden,

leaving barely up to breathe
the tenderest tops
of tomatoes;
an archipelago

of sad zucchini leaves
floating delicate and still,
like Japanese etchings
above the lap of water.

Two days under
and all the while
the drawn water pulled
like a curtain.  Now,

now the green
begins to pale,
sweet-pepper leaves
fold

like dessicate moths,
young broccoli bends,
scoliotic and weak
to the ground.

There is sickness

left by the passage of water
where the mulched and tendered bed
begins to dry;
where even

the memory of water
begins to recede;
where paler burns the green
in the harsh of the sun.

Everything is dying
of politics
in this industrial stink where we live,
in this curdle and seethe

of oil that we leave, the fever
in the railroad creek,
the shapeless ineluctable dark
at the back of the garage.

Here is pestilence
in the shape
of troubled weather.
Here

is Armageddon,
a rainbow scrim from everywhere,
the swill of everything we’re done with:
one more cold uneaten breakfast

on the plate.

by John Bellinger, all rights reserved

---

Every Summer Moon

 

Every summer moon he puts the blue light on, the
voltage of tiny executions all around him, blue,
electric, where he curves into his yard sale chair,
reads the evening paper like religion; coarse and
yellow in the back porch light.

Stranded here at the end of the clocked-out day,
unbending from the lack of room, from the lack of
momentum, he is
       miles away, untended,
eaten whole by every paper fabrication,
                       right justified and stapled shut.

Most mornings he sleeps in late,
over-swimming against the entropy of night,
over, again,    again.
Not without hope,       not with hope

by John Bellinger, all rights reserved

---

Someone loves Mrs. Karen
from a sidewalk

Someone sets
one bent New England Aster
in a picnic cup,
crooked
on the wooden desk,
dribbling water across mimeos,
blurred blue by battle and budget,
sharp with a bracing of alcohol:
with a breath
of unpromised summer
arriving.

He knows she’s set him free
to the illiterate boondoggle daylight,
to the daycamp forever
stretched between boredom
and nothing to do, and
out into evenings
of banana-seat bikes
gathered with friends
where falls flat the perfectly blue
without notice
into the moon-crossing dark
of the moon.

She has sacrificed love
just for summer:
he saw it in her stormed gray eyes
when the last bell left off
with its sentence,
when she swept out and back
the three-o-clock pout
of her petulant hair, when
her face fell flat
like a suppostion
or a modifier
left carelessly,

dangled.

by John Bellinger, all rights reserved