Poetry – Issue 12 | June 2011
Siesta
by Tim Hawkins
These latitudes bring unaccustomed blessings
like mangoes falling on my tin-roofed shack,
the solitude to hear my own confession,
and penance that renounces all I lack.
I’ve passed a grateful season on this couch
in rooms as stark and naked as a prayer
with plywood walls in need of human touch
and fingers tracing nothing in the air.
But outside in the garden where the rains
entreat a teeming lushness from the earth
lianas, epiphytes, and creeping vines
enact a strangling forest of rebirth.
At rest, I lie untouched above the fray
with fragrant strife and rumors of decay.
About the author
Tim Hawkins has lived and traveled widely throughout North America, Southeast Asia and Latin America, where he has worked as a journalist, technical writer, communications manager, and teacher in international schools. He currently lives in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. His writing has appeared in numerous print and online publications, most recently in Four and Twenty, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and Shot Glass Journal, and is forthcoming in Blueline, The Midwest Quarterly, and Verse Wisconsin.
Read our current issue, Issue 12 | June 2011:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
