Scott Waters – Cajun Mutt Press

Brainwash

Rain splashes
on the windows
of my mind

carries accumulated
thought-grime

into gutters

gushes along
through midnight
soul sewers

memory-rats hop
onto concrete ledges
to escape the torrent

homeless ideas
hang from slippery
ladders

until it all empties
from a drainpipe

into the wild

blank

wordless sea

Scott Waters lives in Oakland, California with his wife and son. He graduated with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Scott has published previously in Cajun Mutt Press, Third Wednesday, Main Street Rag, Better Than Starbucks, The Pacific Review, A New Ulster, and many other journals. Scott’s first chapbook was published by Selcouth Station, and his poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Begonia

Digging in the backyard,
among the broken pot shards
and bits of bathroom honeycomb tile
someone threw in a hole
decades ago,
you find a long dirty bone—
mammal, you think,
quite possibly human,
leg or forearm.

Before the call to the police,
you consider possibilities —
a grandma from the Great Depression
buried in the backyard at dusk,
the family encircling the grave
and shyly singing “Amazing Grace”;
a husband murdered by his battered wife
and dissolved in a vat of bubbling lard
except for one pesky femur;
an Indian burial mound
beneath your neighborhood
(there go the property values);
a Neanderthal slain by an arrow
sent like a love note
from an early human’s bow.

Leaning on the shovel,
head whirling, you feel the ground tilt
and reveal itself in sidelong view—
like the ant farm you had as a kid,
the tunnels where the bones and teeth
are tucked away, the worms and bugs
eating their way through millennia,
and you standing on top
of all that death,

when all you wanted to do
was plant a begonia.

Scott Waters lives in Oakland, California with his wife and son. He graduated with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Scott has published previously in Cajun Mutt Press, Third Wednesday Magazine, Main Street Rag, Better Than Starbucks, The Blue Nib, and many other journals. Scott’s first chapbook, Arks, was published by Selcouth Station press, and his poem “I Could Be Anybody” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Tag: Scott Waters

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 07/05/24

Brainwash

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 10/16/23

Begonia