BEVERLY M. COLLINS - POEMS

Beverly M. Collins is the Author of the books, Quiet Observations: Diary thought, Whimsy and Rhyme and Mud in Magic. Her poems have also appeared in California Quarterly, Poetry Speaks! A year of Great Poems and Poets, The Hidden and the Divine Female Voices in Ireland, The Journal of Modern Poetry, Spectrum, The Altadena Poetry Review, Lummox, The Galway Review, Verse of Silence, Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine and many others. 

Winner of a 2019 Naji Naaman Literary Prize for creativity. Collins is also a prize winner for the California State Poetry Society who has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, once for Best Independent American Poetry and “short listed” for the 2018 Pangolin Review Poetry Prize.

​Rite of Passage

I choose this half-fisted-narrow-walkway.
One day rolled hot into another until life was like
a pile of melted living, A too quiet shaded moss
on the side of town where everything else blared
like the stuck horn on a junk-yard car.
I listened to the cicadas call as they resented
my eavesdropping, I wondered how they
landed here in scattered trees that guarded
broken sidewalks. One cannot help but notice the
copy-cat-like wave in their message, pointless as
a pail-of-chuckles. And learn, it’s better to be alone
than follow any crowd. They exist like the people
tucked in these old houses. A soundbite of songs passed
from one generation to the next. In one phase or another
of overcoming plastered expressions and stiff wings.
A smile on their face and hope in a fetal position. All quiet on
the kept-up-front. Where the air is thick and the drowning; easy.
Here is where one learns the rude between raindrops and how
To spell humble. I discovered it’s all right not to have all the answers.
As my tears fell, I reached up to reminds myself; no matter where I
stand, no matter how heavy the heart or chapped the hands, the
sky is still the limit.
 ​

​Morning

There is something about morning that
can cause new growth to show itself;
new pain to throb freely. It allows tires to
flatten into a pancake and blemishes to bold
themselves from where they may have hidden,
just hours before, in the not-yet-morning
shadows. This still-waiting-place conceals
all we would never want to wake up to. It is
the fever blister surprise followed by an
“Oh-no” frown’s crinkle.
Two left feet in misstep that allows
the hands on a clock to tick timely into
“all thumbs.”
 ​

​Room Without Windows

​A no-brainer of bumps and walls.
To walk where darkness has led then
bounce to its hard percussion.
 
When one’s view Is claimed by the
tar of blackness and moaning is no longer
a rare language, how wide is empty?
 
When faced with such a question, some
become like zombies. Air is just a conduit
to smell available flesh. An assistant
in a hunters-state of pre-consumption.
 
They reach out in both; fear-of and a
desperation-to touch. The chase for contact
Itself becomes survival. Soft memories of
Merri-go-rounds fade down into dew drops.
 
A room without windows can be like eyeglasses
selected with black-out shades that cover the view.
A room where one’s own hand closed a door,
then found themselves on the trapped
side of a lock.

​Pareidolia

​Lovable ones, pray friendly and leave corners
to their chaos. You are not how some
envisioned captors. There’s unfitting
to fret over and loose dirt to stumble
through. Like a child, hungry for
 
knowledge and at war with the answers
given. Remember, each step questions
present patterns of formation. Be patient,
determine to keep your laughter. Remain grateful
there is ground to walk upon, however sharp
the gravel.
 
Slow punches can also reshape the world into a
new structure. No matter how bruised this big
blue circle, it will continue to spin. Regardless of the
projections; faces that float and frowns frozen within
steel, trust the filter of your heart’s internal eyes
and release yourself from worry.