Three poems by international writer/photographer Jeff Gardner

• Her Disappointment
• His hair is thin
• His stomach is fat

• His love is limp 
• His neck is stiff

• His hands are clean
• But his mind is filthy

• His account is empty
• Her closets are full

• He is her
• 25-year disappointment.

• Le Buveur (en rimes)
• I knew a Drinker once
• He leaned over my bed to kiss me
• He was never in my home
• He often said he missed me

• When I was much older
• He gave to me this riddle:
• “I filled you up with hurt’n son,
• Cause I was empty in the middle.”

• “And all that beer I swallowed,
• I did so to forget
• About the things I never done,
• And all that I regret.”

• Now the Drinker is bent and grey
• With speckled head and hands
• And I left beside myself
• A boy within a man.

• To the Woman in the Aisle Seat, 13D
• Your nose was neatly taped
• And your dark-circled eyes
• Told the story of how you traveled
• Great distances 
• To find yourself.

• Revealed by needles and knives.

• What did you lose on that trip?
• Anesthetized on a table. 

• Was it the hundred school-yard taunts?
• Or the single expression from the mirror,
• That hurt and hated face?

• Was it his designer promises of approval
• For the girl he just knows you could be?
• (If only, doll face, you tried a little harder)

• Are all of those wounds cutaway?
• Stitched-up?
• Just flesh, and nothing more?
• A past discarded in a red plastic bag,
• A bio-hazard to the new you.

Jeff Gardner holds an MA in history and a Ph.D. in Communication and Writing. For over a decade Jeff has worked in media, writing and taking photographs for publications and organizations across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with his writings and photographic featured in numerous national and international publications and broadcasts. He is among the few photographers/writers to work in Iraq and Syria, documenting extensively the lives of the victims of ISIS and its terror.  Find him at picturechristians.org.