GAS Featured Poet/Artist: Lorie Greenspan

Lorie Greenspan is a poet and artist residing in southeast Florida trying to keep herself and her plants cool during the broiling summer of 2024. Her poetry, including her video poems, have been featured previously in GAS as well as other anthologies and poetry journals. You can see her art on Instagram: @loriegreenspan; her video poems are available on YouTube: @LemonDropPoet.

A tribute to those who climb

Three Studies From Inside The Room 

While Plants Try To Grow in Florida

When The Heat Index is 109 

 

1.

If I were a garden I’d grow

texture out my ears, fluffy velvet

nostrils welcoming shade

my arms would be full hydrangea

a crush of petals

dried out just as pretty, dried out

still strong enough to stand solid in a vase

my face a daisy

my legs tall foxglove

curvy stripes of floppy green

dead all too soon

free of things that annoy.

We all have those flecks

we’d like to pick off ourselves but can’t, our arms

don’t extend that far, remember,

we’re hydrangea puffs,

soft as bubbles             afraid to be crushed.

 

 

 

 2.

Nothing as green ever breathed here.

Clamped tight, trapped in prison

wanting for water

grumpy from air-conditioned air

full-on fists seeking their space

then music floats through walls, and

makes their days steady in pulses

of rhythm light, enter

Bach’s soothing caress

these plants on stands

should thrive in summer

now behind shades cutting the sun’s glare

ungiving these walls but the melody of the violin

takes the air and plumps each breath, if only summer

were as forgiving

if soldiers could hear such music

there would be no war, instead

orchestras on battlefields

boots marching toward Bach

and his violin

in heat of summer, loneliness and anger

a riot of heady fists, all leaves await their time,

oxygen fingers and bayonets, not captured but four walls for a cell –

music calms

green nothings. Wait here, breathe.

 

 

 

3.

The bird

is a scream

from a mouth

darting

diving

from the light

pole,

who bleeps

at light

when they

need to see?

Who cries

in birdsong

when life

isn’t hard enough?

If birds

were vowels

they’d be

never-ending

oooooooooooooos . . .

a sound

the heart

makes

when

it’s done

screaming

GAS Featured Poet: Lorie Greenspan

 Lorie Greenspan is publishing director at a Deerfield Beach, Florida, book publishing company. Prior to moving to Florida in 2015, she was a newspaper editor in New Jersey for more than thirty years. Her poems have been inspired by the death in April 2020 of her husband of twenty years following a long illness. She also has written a middle-grade fantasy novel that she hopes to publish next year (2022).  

Written on a warm day

How does summer feel to you? 

My summer feels like the scratchy floral fabric of a couch 

rich with the smells of all the sweat and crumbs 

of the days and weeks of childhood, 

and the musty lingering of humid walls and woolly rugs. 

 

Summer feels like an overgrown lawn of weeds, 

Queen's Lace, and dandelions, 

or the plastic strips of an outdoor lounge chair

that hug but never mold to your body 

because that would mean 

it was your chair and no one else's. 

And that couldn't be because everyone sat here. 

 

Summer feels like the open window of the bedroom after a thunderstorm 

when the droplets cling to the screen 

and the western angled sun, low on the horizon, 

shines its beams through them and the metal of the screen 

and the dewy scent of the grass become the things you measure across time . . . 

 

It is now this summer, and now this summer, 

and these things become the rusty skeletons of seasons long gone. 

 

It's funny, as you go about adult stuff in a new place, 

where there are no more plastic strips on lawn chairs 

and the couch has long been sent to the dump that you can still feel all of it, 

as if time stands still in the mind, 

as if the mind stands immobile against time 

as if time and the mind are in a race to see which gets priority – 

the lawn chair, the screen, 

the pebbles of stone in the driveway which we didn't mention, 

but are still there –   

all of them do, of course. 

 

That is the thing about growing old. 

Your mind is time 

and it won’t suffer abandonment.