Toni Thomas
Toni Thomas’ poems have appeared in literary magazines in Austria, Spain, New Zealand, Canada, England, Scotland, and Australia. In the United States her work has been accepted for publication in over fifty literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Minnesota Review, Weber-The Contemporary West, Rhino, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry East.
In addition to the books we have published at Annalese Press, Toni has three other poetry collections - Chosen, Fast as Lightning, and Walking on Water. She has received numerous awards along with twice being nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The Secret Language of River
You are a fiefdom
of heavy oak
iced breath
tunneled possum
winter’s bland speech.
I want to drown
my body
in pools so clear
they reflect your face.
Sometimes the sky is
so hazardous
I can’t read your name
am unsure
how to save things.
In Her Soul the Pale Rooms of the Moon Were Wandering
In my dream
we dish out soup
people it with fat noodles.
I am more than a calendar pinup
girl in a clashing red sweater
who disbars the rain.
We eat snow
grow a shimmer pond
harbor of honey.
Mythic deer roam.
The day is enough.
INSIDE HER A RIVER OF SNOW WAS TRAVELING
I want to say
don’t make me ride a dead horse
till I am sick with April
see something more than the squalor of me.
You hairpin words
chop wood
stack it neat as shop meat.
I am almost forty
not sure what I’ll do when the kids leave.
Still vacuum up piles of dog hair
gift wrap meals
work at the school cafeteria
scooping fake cheese
onto the children’s lunch plates?
Perishing in the Rain
This collection of poems explores the nature of perishing; how lovers, places, family can disappear before we are even able to claim them. The poems circle longing, faith, the preciousness of connection, what we leave behind, the mysterious forces that gather in us, tempt us to flame.
The Smooth White Vanishing
Are some lives diminutive, do they come to us as a hidden pearl, unnoticed vestibule. Will the woman heavy with longing find a way to meet banishment with a different gaze?
This collection of poems explores lives that sometimes move invisible, vanish, or become keepers of their own flame.
Here
This Marriage
of turned soil bird eaten bean starts a sun that lifts her head above the horizon then bleeds
this marriage of salt stained sheets smouldering flame wind that whips as it clarifies.
Sometimes I trace your lips on a chalice wear white - virginal. You enter my chamber naked your hands burning and everything seems possible.
There is This
Maybe life was always meant to be understood like this a miracle waiting to happen. Small girls availing themselves of material light flowers that burst forth unnoticed indigo in the unclaimed woods. Your feet are poised between love and the back door jocular cousins that wear thin slippers to bare bone.
Bandits Come and Remove Her Body in the Dark
When you Conquer Heaven
will I be the first to see you in sunlight unburdening the curtains adrift in magenta your abbreviated hems no longer forlorn no longer baiting men with a mint coated breath
but solvent self possessed even in a small, easy on the eyes way that denies the obduracy of roses their thorn flecked faces wages war on the apostles of plenty the walled garden of peonies finds that trace of immigrant sun marries the day?
In the Boarding House for Unclaimed Girls
We learn to consolidate
flirt with scarcity, the half baked field
road kill
refuse the spotless bride
pay as you go summer
nail the wind to keep the sermon of leaves
from fleeing.
Tell me -
when autumn casts her dark net
who will call our name as holy
as if we are more than the marooned rope
shelved prophecy?
THE THINGS WE DON’T KNOW
When the first words came
they must have flirted a new planet
ruby red, luminous
Saturn's dazzle of rings
felt like the trees waving
the baby bouncer lifting us
higher and higher
to where the stars sip sugar milk
every song is a gold canary
IN THE KINGDOM OF LONGING
A book of lyrical verse and visual art.
What is the nature of longing?
Where do we come from...travel to?
How does the sacred inhabit us?
In the Pink Arms of the City
In the pink arms of the city I become the girl who hides in cafes wordless lives on cereal and bread doesn’t want to mercantile her life with a lock and key razor image for money
………………………
We are handholding the streets of Leith as if we have a home, a room, hotplate as if the sky stays loyal our hearts won‘t drizzle
and we want to believe just off Easter Road the Polish couple in Lochend Park are still dancing
Set in the landscape of Scotland these poems explore longing, secret happiness, what abides in the heart’s suitcase.
LOVE ADRIFT IN THE CITY OF STARS
All day I soothe the minefields of my life their faulty tuitions blue shrapnel hemisphere of cancers mind the bright as a button girl child in the field.
She twines dandelion into a headdress mothers the flowers doesn’t yet see trampled what she gifts
Toni Thomas’s poems explore the messy terrain of love, family, loss, beauty ...... the struggle to hold sanctity in a complex world.
THE HOTSY TOTSY BALLROOM
I am your wildest casserole
a Parisian tart of complex experience the hole in your wall am tiramisu cheesecake ancient bread
bite into me slowly
watch what falls away
see what becomes of you.
Set in New York in the 1940's, this collection of poems follows a young woman at the Hotsy Totsy Ballroom where dancers attempt to become artists of the imagination, salve a world weary from war, disillusionment.
At the Hotsy Totsy you can meander through thigh high corn fields, a tropical rain forest, sample Paris in spring, pricey chocolate and caviar, consummate want without the rain.
YOU’LL BE FAST AS LIGHTNING COVETING MY PAINTED TAIL
When I cross the path to happiness
will it speak to me as a snake
devouring the mouse in the field
or bend me into another kind of being
who hears the collapse of the wind
the sun's vigilance
lozenges hope
knows the climate of
her own burning?
Toni Thomas's poems inhabit a world where love is a subversion of slinky dresses, strangers live in our shoes, sea merchants wander, jewels grow on the leafless tree, permeable girls disappear summer evenings, dangle their legs when the tongue of the river can't get enough of them, where longing and the sacred turn out to be more or less the ransom of honey.
ACE RAIDER
My brother's death may seem diminutive
a quarter column in the newspaper
a funeral service with thirty folks
may seem as small as a side alley
leftover pizza
the shy man who walks with a limp
in a big mall
but if you think this way
you will miss something
the ruby in the pea
the way dim surfaces
hold colored light
how a voice sounds when it's noticed
not withered on the vine
but unpeeled
that what we truly witness saves.
Toni Thomas explores the nature of family, emotional trauma, addiction and loss in contemporary working class America through the lens of her relationship with her brother. These poems testify to the deep bonds of love, the ties that even in the midst of hardship bind us.
Blue Halo
Once you could see in the dark
flashed bright as a glow worm
fluorescent
my mother's lips coated you
there was no cadence of brokenness.
Once you built wood ramps
climbed a fire escape
scraped rust off the sky
broke an arm reaching
almost impervious
inside her blue halo.
"The Breakfast of the Dead"
Toni Thomas continues to explore the nature of family, emotional trauma, addiction and loss in contemporary working class America through the lens of her relationship with her brother. These poems testify to the deep bonds of love, the ties that even in the midst of hardship bind us.
