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Barthwell Farmer Poem
Monochrome winds fantail snowdrifts.
Fleck-churned sparks maw feathery flights
and a howling backdraft
spikes matted fur.
Pawing winds spring traps clenched,
injurious icicled haunches hollowed.
A smothering whiteness whistles
through yellow teeth, a smoldering
witness from snow that isn't snow,
(one homeless person's jaw drops, he looks up,)
I wolf down yogurt that drips off the plastic sides,
whitening the Los Angeles sunshine
where some homeless rest on the reflective sidewalk,
all but one, the nimbus of his mouth quakes.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2022
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
Home from a chemo session, uncle lights up
a cigarette and collapses
to the slick plastic that covers your chaise
lounge, auntie. He thumps the upholstery
with his legs and elbows for blood
to circulate again. A flake
drifts. Dehydrated lips, uncle
inadvertently kisses ash. Cushions
puff up, deflate. Uncle floats
smoke rings to prove he still has breath.
Your bulbous urn ruptures his rings
on contact where curvature
casts uncle’s warped reflection, all mouth and smoke,
as he would rise to reach your urn on the mantle.
Uncle slouches back, watches his sports channel.
I head out with his hamper
and forget to check pockets before washing clothes,
his soggy receipts - - once grocery lists? - -
and tissues, torn apart, clumped up, fake snow
I have to scoop out of washing machines.
Absent-minded tasks at the laundromat, auntie,
where you’d bend in pain. Lint trays reinstall
fluff. I snap
and snap airborne dryer-flakes off towels.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2022
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
One eye opens quicker than the other, so cute,
but who'll spearhead you home, me or the Neanderthal
host? Party goers head for the exit.
I seem to have sat down on a preset remote;
your laugh echoes the empty house mute.
White rain is a flat-screen,
crystalline-chilled, melting pixels.
Your other eye, I swear, winks at the storm.
A breaker, somewhere, thumbs a ride to the red zone.
Shadowy reflections of his indoor lighting
vanish from his TV
and abandon the glass of his aquarium.
Goldfish swim undisturbed
above the sediment of jagged, tiny stepping stones,
footholds for drunks to surface when bubbly
as with our host, brushing 'gainst you.
He toggles your dress by its fished out price
tag. Not my place to scan,
I blink like a readjusted lens off focus.
He sets us both out on the porch;
he's done with milking you to compliment him.
We're Banner milk bottles, side by side on the stairs.
Rain pelts milk-shiny, glassy sides. You shiver instead of going
numb and bottled up in reflections
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2021
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
A whiff of my kitchen, a medicinal pill,
the side order of rain drools at a windowsill.
An utterance precedes a service; the rumble,
the window slides itself shut. A bumble
bee ricochets off a glass pane
moaning louder than our train
of thought waylaid with bacon sizzling up a storm.
There's an anxiousness trapped inside as warm
as indoors petrichor's marshmallow mood
steamed under nostrils fused above burned food.
A swirl follows itself in a perfect circle
on a smartphone screen. The attentive middle
of somewhere where I don't know where I am headed
while time and place are forgettably wedded,
O lips lit up, no doubt, by the whitening screen,
words digitize what would otherwise burn green.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2025
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
We're mannequins peering from a storage
bin. We slouch across from
the "No-Food" paper sign.
Its message sags to a pulp taped to the shoulders
of a glass door. Shoppers,
incoming, their shared orange
squirts juice. Our mannequin-custodial
grins bar us from the lips' sweet 'oh'.
Crowdsourcing emboldens shame, our French kisses hung
on tangy wind chimes breezes tongue.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2025
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
The muzzle flash of the moon is infused with clouds
where the brightness tapers off on knees that poke through
the slit in her dress; the hem slips off her crossed legs.
Gunpowder in sieves flecks her irises
when she glimpses through my lunar haze
of daydreams that I'll trigger her to smile.
A Guns N' Roses song flogs silence in the back-
ground of my mind as she stands to shake
hands I synchronously half-rotate to kiss.
Her wedding ring tastes like zinc, or some strange kettle
of moondust while she avers that I look as pale
as mists conspiring to discover our trail.
Though we can't see her butler crack the whip to keep
a distant carriage in place,
whinnying clouds beam a grin to her face.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2025
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
Fallen leaves knuckled
below eddies float again
along the slick street.
Rain withers with gray
asphalt rising. Curbs cement
leggy puddle spills.
Sunlit raindrops stop
hissing at guttural moans
tickling us for laughs.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2025
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
A runaway growth of weeds alongside the road,
greenery gone wild,
a stagnant wilderness unwinding,
seedy leaves scatter
but cannot flee. Dust bowl squalor
chokes down scrawny roots.
A gray sugar rush from speedy cube trucks sprinkles
what wiggle room is left to sweeten ameciated tongues.
You Are
a coffin lid with nails
pulled out, a quake's handrails
the paws releasing snails
a Rorschach of Swiss trails
the comb still stuck in Wales'
hair pounding on my sails
You're you when all else fails
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2025
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
Biking through winter's fog machine
as flakes swarm them to keep them warm,
kids exhale and are vaporized
from sight still clunking and clinking.
So much for fresh snow to unpack,
I wander across a
vanishing track.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2026
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Barthwell Farmer Poem
As if I'll whiff a sack of onions fried
brown from years of cigarette smoke,
a stolon-shaped cobweb dangles from a ceiling.
A woman's double hello and smile upend
bookends of a full-blown dream.
A bank and a doughnut shop seem
to arrive as she'll pass them from around a bend.
A spider plant below eye level,
a flashlight floats past
a dormant light switch.
Copyright © Barthwell Farmer | Year Posted 2026
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