Poems by John P. Kristofco

beignets

we stand with all the others
on line for tiny tables floating
on a powdered sugar sea,
there because it’s what we do,
“you went to get beignets, of course,”
like we go to work, to church,
to war, to Disney since they built it;
baptized to the one of everyone,
we get powder on our hands, our clothes,
and take it with us everywhere,
spread it like a gospel, virus,
until we are all Café  Du Monde,
the every in the everyone,
and know, at last,
exactly why it is we come

waiting for the world…

…to come to you, your window
where you’ve sat since you were told
that it would surely come
to sweep you in its arms,
wrap you in its need, its hunger
for the sunlight in your hair,
the one-and-only emerald in your eyes;
S.A.T.’s and letters on the desk,
the miracle inside the looking glass,
salvation package patient for its ride,
brilliance but for shadows on the floor
that find, when you turn your face away,
the gray and wrinkles in the mirror
looking out to twilight,
waiting for what’s left of you to leave

Hummingbird Feeder

we place it by the window facing south
filled with thick red syrup,
summer ruby jewel flashing in the light,
hypnotizing me, not them,
they who never come,
not like ordinary birds that flap their brown and gray
at simple seeds snapped like seconds
sending sun to shadow;
the wizards never come
though the nectar’s gone,
evaporates, perhaps,
just like days set out in waiting
for our evanescent moment in the sun