djana kolaj

there’s a scooter

There’s a scooter screeching through my neighborhood
Where the highway is grunting, always breathing
Heavy, heavy broken-bass drum steady
With concrete pillar appendages and asphalt skin

I hear the mouth of a million machines speak into my sleep
Almost every night I hear it
Never a conversation,                        
but distant dialogue determined
Through diesel dentures
are steel syllables

Almost every night
I hear it.

And almost every night,
I close my eyes
My body blanketed in my warm world
As I listen to the highway breathing
And I see the wind blowing between a thousand                  
tall trees                                                          There’s a chorus of crickets and a choir of   
singing toads                                                              The green-yellow        never   red lights of
free flying fireflies                                                            

In their sound is silence
And I wonder-

Where

did

the

scooter go?

Stories of the Sea

are told,
in the sweat that seeps
where skin likes to fold,
in the salty tears that slide
from the tidal pool
of enigmatic eyes

Stories of the sea tell,
in the sweet swell
of lover’s lips
in the divinity between hips
at the life portal’s well-

the salt of the sea slipping slow
the slant of her thighs;
is the water of the womb
you taste on your tongue.