My voice curls around
the body of itself, mingling
only in air with yours.
This poem is like a lover,

come to undress my mind
in early light — or along
the moonswept bank of night

breathing and swaying with me,
crooning a song I cannot know
until it caresses my lips

wets the air with desire
and breaks through the pen
to paper, a place that love

brings home to greet you.

Ms. Lappen gratefully acknowledges this poem’s first publication in New Works Review, Vol. 3, No. 1., Jan., 2000.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

At sunrise, the moon winks,
half exposed, half robed.
Would that light and shadow
were always so easily
distinguished as upon
this desert morn
when jade bedecked buttes
rise up to meet the sun
and hot air balloons float —
then roar greetings
to a coyote scampering across
the dawn. Elsewhere, though,
it is never so easy to see.

“Dawn” was first published in New Works Review in 2001, Vol 4, No. 1.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Prairie half-moon gazes;
Coyotes spread the star-sky
As thin as unfed flesh.
Their silken screams rise.

I move too close:
The knotted desert rocks
Snap, crumble underfoot.
Quiet night, where are you?

My algid nightmare thrives:
I am the barren Jew,
The wailful wanderer
Raped in a dry land.

My eyes widen to catch
Its silhouette. Crest light
Teases these lids to sleep —
Only to see the darker half.

©Copyright 1972, renewed 1998, by Alyssa A. Lappen, first published by Switched-on Gutenberg, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1998

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

William Hogarth made the world with etchings
of which I heard when I was young
and saw a few years later
in a London museum.
His city was raw—too rough
for unseasoned idealists
(like I was then) to fathom.

There was a lesson, though,
in those sketches I did not see
’til now; I was to live,
jotting my own impressions
on my brain,
each line indelibly framed
against a day when I’d need
to tell someone, to teach
that life has meaning,
and pain is the price
of learning what.

“Illustrations” was first published in Kudzu in January 1998.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

for D. H. C., Jan. 7, 1927-July 30, 1997

If only the roses could throw off
their mantle of death, the half-sheared
mid-summer cape of blooms—
long past prime and drying,
their petals flaking like dead skin to the touch—
still draped across the tower of thorns
that rises above your roof.

Always, before, you disrobed death
in a few July days of deft clipping
from a ladder.
The briars grabbed and nibbled
at your skin. But you prevailed.

No longer. Now the sun
will rise, forever, and forever,
on the unfinished work.

Still, your voice rises
in storm gusts from the north,
the vastness of your breath
taking those dead blooms again.

Your littlest grandson hears it yet,
and oblivious to irony,
runs as boats approach and shouts,
“Bompie’s coming back!”

But so you are, albeit in younger forms, already here.
The children have absorbed in their short years
your many gifts–that trademark twinkle,
reassuring blinks and waggles of the tongue,
firm grip and loving eye,
silent blessings that bid us to go on.

“Jepson Island” was first published in Kudzu in 1998.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.