All Things Want To Tell The Truth But Can’t

by Lisa Megraw
Wild Poetry Forum
Second Place, January 2015
Judged by Ned Balbo


Take the car’s burnt out body, oil gushing
over the frost tinged highway.

The kettle that has boiled over in anger,
flowers torn from the stems

because without truth
there must be release,

like the apple tree moments
before the sky breaks into rain.

Take the man who has limped
home through bushes, fence posts,

weaved through stars of Cypress vines
in confusion, a gash running like a road

across his head, but his wife won’t listen
any more. She packed her love away

years ago next to her socks and passport.
Now as the night ticks on between the static

of radio stations, a bruised apple
leaning against a hub cap

begins to feel its skin seal over
the dark slush exposure.


Whether they do or not, we want to think they do, and this poem helps us to believe it. Only rarely does our tendency to see the inanimate as alive result in a poem so true to the shadows of the human heart, our inability to repair what's wrong between us. --Ned Balbo