Poetry by J.D. Isip

      Kenneth Spencer CC




You Don’t Miss Us. You Miss Being Young.

Says the meme of a Blockbuster video. Maybe.
But look at the blue and the yellow – so blue, so yellow.
What you miss being is what you miss seeing, hues
so vibrant, almost electric, almost alive.

What you miss seeing is what you miss being, you
were (once) vibrant, electric, and alive.
But look at the you you became – so yellow, so blue.
Fading into a meme. Will you be missed? Maybe.





Father of Lights
James 1:17

It happened as most things do, without notice
he became someone else, somebody’s husband
begging off tickets to the game, a boys’ night,
overexplaining how sick she was.

How sick she was of him and of this life.
That’s how she put it.

Alcoholism is a sickness, they diagnose it now,
nobody looks down if you say divorce, if it is
an affair or abuse, the kind that leaves physical
scars, or if your differences are irreconcilable.

Not that he believed in such things. Who
would want out of this life?

But to leave someone, the mother of your child,
in the height of her disease, forget the cruelty,
she’s sick, forget the specific instructions, make
her a drink, leave it on the steps, be gone.

She says he was enabling her. And caging
her. He’d do anything for her.

He is stringing Christmas lights with his girl,
months after he did it, finally gave up the ghost
of their long-dead vows, and she’d ask for her,
why did her mother have to go away?

He doesn’t know. There’s a row of dead lights
and he can’t find the one to fix it.

There are questions that will stump him, Santa,
the tooth fairy, how does a plane, so heavy, stay
up in the air, why does her heart feel like a flame,
why do people leave us, daddy, why are you crying?



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J.D. Isip’s collections include Reluctant Prophets (Moon Tide Press, 2025), Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023), and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). J.D. teaches in South Texas where he lives with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.