Blue
Fractals flake
into color coded
notebooks, never
realizing the remnants
are wholly wiser
for leaving latent
traces of truth
like string, shepherding
mislaid migrants
through tiers
of ultramarine uncertainty.

Black
Bombast dislodges teeth
leaving bones to moan
in places they don’t be long.
Artillery girdles me
and scaffolds tomorrow
with pock marked assurance
note it will never be that way…

Again.

Red
When politicians seize
philosophical intent
never doubt pending
emblematic failure.
Yet, even in this,
failure’s fertilizer
fuels the labored push
needed to conceive
equanimity.

Yellow
The irony of extension
facilitating the final blow
that spins this dervish out
and leaves fragments of another’s
fingerprints littered like
hammerscale about the room
is not obscured. Now, I am
the sulfer, smithed
and forgotten.

Gold
I am the lovelorn bullet
ricocheting off the blue
fractured summits and
red dawn hills. I embrace
my fractal existence but know
skeleton keys are a lie
told to pacify children and fools
who demand structure
in an unreasonable universe.

You’ll find no answers here
that aren’t in the margins
of other pages. Yet,
as I split my own molecules,
I’ll never taste the constancy
they contain. I am destined
to die, never knowing
a heart’s feathered weight.

Tamara Fricke is the 2010 co-winner of the Gertrude Claytor Award of the Academy of American Poets and is previously published by The Lyon Review, Meat for Tea, Attack Bear Press Poetry Vending Machine, Whisper and the Roar, We Will Not Be Silenced, and has been included in a number of compilations.  Her poetry chapbook Our Requiem was released in 2014.  She lives in Springfield, MA, with an ungrateful cat, where she writes grants professionally.