Beyond bombs

ears tune out nightly news—

Tune into fists-pounded walls

shrieks out the mouth

seeping through from flat 22.

Between blowouts

chaos is a distant backdrop—

Shifting eyes, twitching energy

paint home city sidewalks 

into lands of wandering lost.

Above smoke plumes

Heaven’s in sight—

floating sweatshop in the sky

tasking a million battered infant angels 

to knit a turtleneck too tight—

And our world chokes in it.

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Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Roque discovered his love for poetry and prose amid friends on the bleachers of Pasadena City College. Now he currently lives in the Middle East and is being inspired by the world around him. His poems have been published by literary magazines like North Dakota Quarterly, Cholla Needles, The Literary Hatchet and others.