Eve Lyons's Blog

Trigger Warning has published

In September of 2024, Snoozine has published a new fiction piece of mine! Check it out.

Gorgeous handmade, limited edition of poems about the pandemic and being a therapist. Get yours now!

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1628208475/

First published in Prospectus in May 2021. Nominated for a Best of the Net Award in July 2021.

I planted 100 tulip bulbs last fall,
rather I hired Ian to put them in the ground.
I’m always running out of time.

This month sturdy green leaves shot
out of the ground as if to say, is it safe to come out?
Have the frost and the blight ended?

No, I want to tell them. We’re all hunkering down.
We’re not leaving our homes,
why should you?

We’re not bothered by your plagues, they tell me.
We represent perfect love, wealth and royalty,
we cannot be defeated.

What about the jealousy of yellow tulips? I ask.
That’s a myth, they tsk tsk. Humans 
always insist on creating the ugly where it isn’t.

The ugly comes from inside us,
I say, feeling defensive.
I don’t know how to be anything else but human.

We know, the tulips tell me.
We’re coming out, and you’ll have to wait 
to see which colors we are.

Horseshoe crab

They amble across sand

for millions of years

sometimes with another one

impregnating it

knowing nothing

of viral pandemics

nor Pride parades

They don’t hug

laugh

tell stories.

Yet there they go

just surviving.

First published in Literary Cocktail in October 2022

First published in Mutha magazine in October 2022

Five Answers to the Same Question                             After Faisal Mohyuddin

He hasn’t heard from his first mom

It’s been years. 

2.

He loves to explore underwater

Worlds under our world

Thousands of sunken slave ships.  

3.

We tried for years to get pregnant

But stopped short at engineering

Waited for a woman to find us.

4.

He loves every sport with a ball

He has endless social energy 

He didn’t get this from us. 

5.

We are the lucky ones. 

His first mom carried him 

They both carry the loss. 

This poem was first published by The Mocking Owl Roost in January of 2022.

In 1992 Los Angeles erupted into riots
Latasha Harlins was murdered by a Korean shopkeeper.

She was fifteen. Her murderer served time,
unlike the white cops who beat Rodney King

Which tells you everything
you need to know about white privilege.

I was in my freshman year of college
watching the riots on television in my dorm.

My closest friend was from South Central LA
Yet it still didn’t feel real, at least not to me.

The shock that can only come
from realizing you’re white,
no matter how othered
you’ve been as a Jew, as a queer.

You’ve been living under a rock
while black people look at that rock

in envy: Rocks are a good place
to hide or can be weapons to throw.

Twenty-eight years later
Minneapolis police murder a black man,

after St Louis police,
after Staten Island police,

after state troopers in Texas,
after state troopers in South Carolina.

Our whole country erupted.

Enough is enough,
White people finally said.
Black people shaking their heads:
What took you so long?

Tree of Hope

Published  by The Aerogramme Center in December of 2021 (Volume 2: Issue 1) along with several other poems of mine.

Two thousand year old Judean date palm seeds

A tree thought to be extinct 

One day a scientist pulled the seeds out of a drawer

Seeds that were found in an ancient clay pot  

**

A tree thought to be extinct 

An archeologist plopped small brown seed in the ground 

She found it in a clay pot

 “Could it still grow? Is that possible?” 

**

An archeologist placed the almond-like seed 

When all hope was lost

It seemed impossible

We plant the seeds anyway

**

When all hope was lost 

Six weeks later, a Judean date palm sprouts

This is why we plant the seeds

Someday there may be a forest. 

**

The first Judean date palm in two millennia

From thousand year old date palm seeds

Someday there may be a forest of bushy palm leaves

We’re all waiting for science to save us. 

First published in  In Our Shoes: LGBTQ anthology (New Wasteland) in June of 2021 for only $5! I have two other poems included.

Like so many people 

I have trouble letting go: 

Birthday cards, holiday cards, 

theater programs, artwork by my kid,

found objects and surviving earrings

that someday might become art.  

Meanwhile the snow piles up

buries everything in a blanket of white.

The temperature drops to twelve degrees. 

Nothing can survive outside for very long.

Yet there are people and cats and hawks

trying to do just that. 

We are living through a pandemic, 

not even the first of my lifetime

just the first one to get the money 

and scientists’ attention for a vaccine 

in under a year.  Unheard of. 

Ghosts of gay men shake their heads. 

These days, I rarely leave my house. 

Grocery pick up, check the mail, runs

at least once a week. I’ve started running 

through the cemetery. 

Tombstones from the 1600’s mingle 

with Boy Scouts labeling the trees.  

Somedays survival is all we can do

The snow will melt, the earth is warming,

the kid grows up 

far too quickly

for something wanted for so long. 

So many onesies he only wore once.