Brick Road Poetry Press

poetry made to edify

The mission of Brick Road Poetry Press is to publish and promote poetry that entertains, amuses, edifies, and surprises a wide audience of appreciative readers.  We are not qualified to judge who deserves to be published, so we concentrate on publishing what we enjoy. Our preference is for poetry geared toward dramatizing the human experience in language rich with sensory image and metaphor, recognizing that poetry can be, at one and the same time, both familiar as the perspiration of daily labor and as outrageous as a carnival sideshow.

Poetry by Amy Wright from Cracker Sonnets

Order Cracker Sonnets here!

Jax Ovie Blows Perfect Smoke Rings in Farnham’s Musty Playhouse

 

Morning throttles Jax’s motor,

lowers her frost skirt for him,

if someone else’s bride.  Let Lambs

work their way up class ladders

with Starter hats and Nikes, he

thinks when Colleen clicks past

ignoring catcalls, heels snapping concrete,

a jar of maraschino cherries jiggling, ready

to be tossed into her Alka-Seltzer

before she drops wasp-waisted onto the

stage apron, owing nothing to no man

and off all day tomorrow.

 

Daughertys Don’t Live like Whitfields

 

 

with ponytails

tucked under trucker caps, clambering

up fig boughs rapt by Kentucky racetracks’

orphic buzz,

but like migratory Arctic terns

who top Tew Knob and yodel out of earshot,

voices joyriding peaks and valleys.

 

No blue kite ducks their cottonwoods

only to nosedive tomato vines.  No stuck

drawer is their laughter, whittled

albatross their suggestion box.

 

Blessed addicts with 24-hour drugstore panacea,

they sigh in recliners, lungs a euphonic accordion,

steady, fathomable, and absolute.

 

Eye of Every Storm

 

 

Fat Ehud sips ash, one knee cocked

on rusted bumpers, jabs elbows down Central

High hallways, bowls Star Williams into

lockers, unlit cigarette dribbling

scorn, denim jacket thrown

down with aplomb.

Motorcyle idling, prepped

to litter night’s oceanic pastures,

fingers snapping like pinged gravel

so that nothing about that town is the same

come morning, thirst’s slick stone

in a bedside Dixie cup, white crickets

nibbling horizon’s goblin rind.

 

Virginia Leabus’ Dreams Are Stuffed Chicken Wire Parading Promises

 

 

After two failed marriages, Virginia goes on

sauerkraut diets, splits hogsheads of molasses

with Martha, shreds deeds.  Her ribs

bowed pines under snow, her eyes flyspecked

windows in bright sun.

She hangs upturned bells and horseshoe talismans

of hope she may live beyond the life she was given,

pulls two beers clinking from the refrigerator,

a sleeve of light flaring in her dark apartment.

 

“What it means to have a woman’s body,”

she tells her daughter, “is to stand at the mouth of the cave

and be the cave.  Bats flying out of it like hearts.”

 

Coralee Robbins Showers in the Dark

  

in clawfoot bathtubs, coos bless yous, raising

heron-blue fishermen with waved handkerchiefs.

Harried, she rear-ends a Civic on Jefferson,

drawls, bottom lip a curl of baler twine,

forgets to mind her dead, circles lakes and bonfires,

howls over slick-glazed, sweet-sauced carcasses,

which she fingertip-dabs with Wetnaps,

communing foremost with the holy

mackerels of deliciousness.

 

Bea Lineberry Doesn’t Deserve This. What Does It Mean to Deserve.

  

Bea renders the Beloved’s fat into Crisco,

pours her heart into the great collaborative

dumbwaiter, consoles herself with peppermint

toddies & Hershey’s syrup, toe trails sunset-pecked

barns’ slow fade, dreams in third person, gorges

mahogany bookcases with series romances, fasts

after backwoods church services until nothing

is ordinary or all things are.

 

Convoys Nucleate in Pizza Hut Parking Lots like Blue Angel Formations at an Air Show

  

Roy and Lynn play games like Barbara Is Electric

and I Am A Radio Song, Rumble in the Nurses’

Station, and Beg.  They launder hands on mango-colored

hand towels after fixing the car.  Always fixing

cars or produce stands or each other, so many Adcocks

have their windows tinted they have nearly conquered

happiness in the form of license plate identification,

which they frame in purple lights to find “Hankstr” and

“Lalabrd” and “Pandoo” across Vesuvian arrow-streaked

plains.  They turn forty-five without Benedictine

in their cupboards, likening all such collectibles

to lint cakes one eventually learns to dispense with.

 

Order Cracker Sonnets here!