Bonus Poem for February

Leap Day

Wake up!
Today is leap day!
Leap into this moment.
Today, the day
that only comes once
every four years;
the day that man made
to correct the slippage
in the cosmic clock.

Who figures these
things out, anyway?
When I can’t even
decide what to eat
for breakfast,
who can measure
and determine
what to do with time?

Who got the whole darn
world to recognize
leap year?
Let’s get that guy or gal
working on world peace
and the green house effect
today, right now.

Or is leap year
just another one of
those false constructs
that delude us
into thinking
we’ve mastered
the time-space continuum?

No matter.
I will leap today
and every day
because this moment
is here forever,
always new,
always the next breath.

Lisa Vihos

A Poem for February

3 a.m. Hot Flash

You know that oven?
The one where sometimes

they say there is a bun?
Without warning,

that oven door busts open
on its rusty hinge

to radiate a dying sun,
a nuclear explosion. Then,

hot needles prick me
along every extremity.

Am I getting a tattoo?
Spontaneous combustion?

Cauterizing heat seeps
and settles in the shoulders,

smolders in the chest,
a super nova of the soul.

An image etched
of an imploding star,

of red hot coals—
the kind you find

when you flip over
the last log in the fire pit,

its ashen underbelly
all aglow within. So pretty,

until that belly is in you.
Fortunately, it’s a dry heat.

There is no sweat, yet.
Maybe later, I’ll be drenched.

For now the burning is enough.
A brief, five-alarm fire storm.

Where are those damn firemen
with their ladders and hose?

Before they come,
the inferno goes, quickly as it came.

I toss the covers, red lava flows,
and I am left without my heat, alone,

extinguished on the bed sheet
seared, cold as burnished bone.

Lisa Vihos