Poetry

I take my poem to a laboratory. It smells
like chrysanthemums.
A team of doctors wearing gas masks tells me
poetry is an equation with a solution. The last
line will not save lives. They place my poem in a
beaker. They should have planted it in a
porcelain pot.

Edward Hopper

I’m jealous of the sky,
Hopper says.

Breathe it in, I say.

Am I stoned or a canvas?
Did I still life myself into a pebble?

Am I not worthy of skipping
on a lake’s surface tension?

A shot of orange color
hits me with atomic force.

I am expansive lava, meteor.

Hammock

I have fallen
in the universe’s hammock.
I listen to the trees
walk and skip around me.
I am the White Rabbit
I feel the kindness
of dice roll around my knees.

Alma Thomas

Painting is
howling

in a howl
of eternal howls

shaped
like an egg

of scrambled
howls.

I am lost in a blue forest
speckled with purple rain

and yellow sounds
of butter melting.

Regie Cabico is the first Asian American Poet and openly Queer Poet to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and is a 3 Time National Poetry Slam Finalist. His work has appeared on TEDx Talk, HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR’s Snap Judgement. He is the recipient of a Writers In Residency from La Maison Baldwin and The Asian Pacific Studies Artist in Residence at NYU. Awards include a New York Innovative Theater Award for his work on the New York Neo-Futurists production of Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. His first full-length collection of poetry is A Rabbit in Search of a Rolex (Day Eight, 2023).

Image: Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons