When you shuck off your sweatshirt
and shake your hair out with your hand,
I can hardly bear to let you go
to shave your legs
or write a poem
or to admire the dark summer color of the prairie rose.
I gather in your abandoned second skin,
wrapping the sleeve around my wrist
so that I can tell time by the you-warmth still there and pressed at my pulse points.
There is mojo and sweetgum in everything you have touched--
it is medicine for every longing.
Outside the window is the redbud tree,
scratching on the glass as if it were some beautiful prisoner.
Come back to bed, honey--
I crave the tang and scent of you,
and to brush my face,
my fingers,
everything I am and all my desire
against the dark summer color of the prairie rose.
_______
for Karen's word list at Real Toads.
I wanted to add Roxy Music's song "Prairie Rose", but they didn't have a good recording of it.
News note: today is my birthday!
i yam a girl
of deli-cat sensibilities.
not just enny trash can
can make my bed--
not just enny edition
can pillow my hed.
in another life,
i wuz cleopatra.
and that, sir or madam as the case may be,
means you should have deli-cat manners
around such as me.
if you wave some pastrami,
it's possible you may charm me,
but if you're cagey
you will fish up for me
something dumb and scaly from the sea.
I yam a girl
of deli-cat sensibilities
and a fine poetic naychur,
so you probly want to make sure
to bring sardines and starfish--
one to eat and one to make a wish
if you want to win me.
i was an egyptian queen,
and you need to remember that.
now, thank you for your kind attenshun,
but it is noon,
and time for my royal nap!
_________
Mehitabel the cat created by Don Marquis. The artwork is his.
They kicked me out of the harem.
One minute I was sucking on a grape,
listening to Trixie tell Helen Keller jokes,
How does Helen Keller drive a car?
With one hand on the wheel and the other on the road.
How did Helen Keller ruin her nails?
Reading roadside signs.
How did Helen Keller burn her ear?
Answering the iron.
and the next, I was being dropped at the old filthy-ass bus station downtown
with my duffel and my backpack, like some parolee.
Inside, there were no pillows,
no peacock feather fans,
just hard plastic seats and a vending machine filled with crap like pork rinds and pop tarts.
I guess they weren't expecting a lady.
It's not that the harem was the greatest place to be, you understand.
When he calls you, you've got to act all swoony and glad about it.
You can't roll your eyes and go,
"Right now? Well fuck a damn duck!" like I did.
You also can't get away with a quick hand job while flipping through Cosmo with the other.
I learned that the first week.
You've got to be engaged, or he gets all bent out of shape about it.
A word about those Cosmo articles--
you know the ones.
1,000 sexy secrets that will drive him wild!!!
If those really worked, there would be grinning goofy-faced men walking around everywhere, wandering into traffic with their shirts buttoned wrong.
There aren't.
I rest my case.
It was this kind of thinking that got me thrown out of the harem.
I needed that job.
I'm the single mother of a six month old chameleon named Rainbow Happy,
and we can't eat wolf whistles.
I will admit, right here, that I complained a lot--
about those stupid pastel paint jobs on the walls, like we were living inside an Easter egg,
and the way the eunuchs never knew the baseball scores despite knowing that I would ask every morning.
I couldn't manipulate charm them, cos they weren't really men anymore,
but they could sure sock away the pizza like a bunch of doughy, pasty-faced truck drivers.
This is all very difficult for me.
Here, take my duffel, all my dainties are inside and I can't lose them.
Maybe I'll catch the four-fifteen to Seattle,
or the five-thirty to Salt Lake City.
Do Mormons have harems?
I can do a great Marie Osmond.
Listen to me belt out "Paper Roses"!
A girl with my skill set should be able to land a new gig in nothing flat, don't you think?
Hey, it's been nice chatting with you, but I've got the highway in my blood, and all that hokey stuff they say in the movies.
Marilyn Monroe put it best:
Just because you fail once,
doesn't mean you're going to fail at everything.
Marilyn was smarter than people think.
She read books, she had a lot going on, but people think she was just blonde hair and great boobs.
Are you even listening to me? My face is up here, by the way.
I'm off into the great unknown.
Give me your email, I'll let you know when I hit Flagstaff.
I went through there once when I was thirteen, in May, and it was snowing.
The guy next to me put his hand on my knee, so I faked a coughing fit and jerked forward.
He smashed his fingers on the metal edge of the seat in front of us;
it was just like breaking up a bird for Sunday dinner.
I got kicked off that bus.
They didn't understand the burden of beauty,
and I had to stand before a judge and explain my "violent outburst."
He told me I seemed like a nice girl and why don't we discuss this privately?
Well, I never look a gift horse yadda yadda.
But when he took off his robes and everything, he looked like a wookie,
and I couldn't help it, I started to laugh.
I got pitched out of his chambers and straight out of town,
like common trash.
No one in the modern world appreciates true beauty,
and so I wander like a mystic,
or a peculiarly hot-looking staretz,
searching for my place in life,
teaching when I can, loving when they agree to use protection,
and just trying to perfect my soul
so that they won't throw me out of Heaven before I've made any friends,
or gotten to try those little crepes that I hear they make up there.
I want mine with strawberries,
and not a man in sight.
________
The storm chaser
found the narrow way
down a straight road
into the wind's dark blue heart.
There, she found
Athena with her bolts,
wearing a silver-black snake around her arm,
falcon feathers in her hair,
and not much else.
When the storm chaser kissed Athena--
rippling strikes across the sky.
When the storm chaser loved Athena--
hail from the heavens, honey on her thigh.
When the storm chaser got home,
there was no sign of the damage to her car.
She had swapped out the mirrors
and bumped out the dents
herself, at a truck stop in Stephens County.
"Where did you go?"
"Shopping," she said,
with a forked tongue as sure and sweet as tupelo.
_________
_________
He put his arms around her.
She said, "Why do you hate me so much?"
He carried her to the car, past the new flowers in their beds,
pinning her arms at her sides and never saying a word.
The night before, there had been a spring moon.
Their son awoke; the hour was odd.
"Mama, why are you staring at me?"
On the lawn, robins cock their heads, listening for vibrations.
The yard teems with worms. He starts the car.
In the parking garage at the hospital, she does her rag doll routine.
Dead weight and mute, he has to load her into a wheelchair.
They met in the early summer, years before.
He hadn't known where she had just spent the past few weeks.
At the doctor's first question, she leaps up from her chair and stalks across the hall.
"There's nothing wrong with me."
Here is the thing about a spring moon--
it will cross the darkness in its own way.
Nothing anyone can do can change the cycles she must pass through,
but once a month she is beautiful again.
He can't help watching as she loses her light by degrees,
eaten away, becoming a memory, impossible to love any longer,
finally and at last unrecognizable.
_____________
"and the flowers bloom like madness in the spring" -- Jenny Anderson.
for Izy's Out Of Standard at Toads.
If you had asked, I would have told you--
I am sitting with the lions.
I didn't go to them--
they came to me.
They always do.
The stench of their last meal rolls from their open, panting mouths,
like a ghost-scream from the one consumed--
the one that did not get away.
They are covered in flies.
The flies know what they want, but not how to get it.
They want death, but death is inside,
a backwards cub giving life to the lions.
The flies know this,
can hear this,
covet this,
see it in thousands with their minds' compound eyes,
but all they can do is buzz and annoy.
This is why we despise the flies.
Did I say "we"?
I am sitting with the lions, but I am by myself.
I can see for miles in every direction,
but I cannot see the curve of the earth.
If you had asked, I would have told you--
I am changing.
Always, I have loved the zebras.
I have been the admiring dust around their running,
and when they have made their distinctive coughing call,
I have always looked up
as if expecting a lover to say something kind.
Now, sitting with the lions,
I see the zebra's perfect hooves and think,
"I cannot eat those, or the hair; only the stripes:
live/
perish/
live/
perish.
This is not the woman I have always--or ever--been.
Rebel, rebel, you torn your dress...
but it is just the lions idly batting me to the ground
like an anthill made of girl.
This morning, when the lions first came,
I thought to tell you all these things.
I have been a river, pure and deep,
a few dozen dreams from the place you sleep;
I have been the moments when your mind was still
and your limbs were loose.
If you had asked, I would have told you--
everything that a thousand years of crossings have taught my flowing blood.
I would have told you how my fingers have no other purpose but to touch your skin,
and how this yearning has refracted and filled my imagination
a thousand times.
If you had asked, I would have told you--
but you didn't;
and here among the lions,
I think it best, now, that I remain silent.
________
inspired by "Lions Abide" by Talon. Find it HERE.
She gave the visiting priest the black-glove treatment,
and when he went back to the brothers,
it was with the gnostic gospel of her kiss still on his lips
instead of The Word.
She was just never gonna fit in, that was the trouble,
and so she went strong and weedy within herself,
strangling out the greenhouse virgins and marking the garden stones
like a dog or a boy or a moondevil, beyond the reach of common caution.
He found her crying in the parking lot garden,
wrapped in a mantilla of broody dark clouds,
with accents of deep red and sharp silver,
the poems in blood of her price, her anger, and her power.
He called her Little Pea Hen, and tilted her chin up with his fingertips,
a shepherd holding her hair in one hand and his shears in the other.
What would you have done, if you had been her,
set out that day on the bright paving stones like a bottle jar?
Every time she put her hands together to pray,
the wind kicked up and a cold downdraft made her skirts whip around
like nervous wolves.
Do I need to say the rest? Must some cleric put it down in ink?
All I know is this:
These days, her hips are as curved as cathedral bells,
and though she is covered in yards of cloth like a vieja,
she carries a secret, and will dance until red leaf Autumn,
then sigh and give birth to a black diamond,
held like fry bread or the host,
blessed and divided the way she demands it to be,
in the beaks of her devoted flock, her kindred darlings, the crows.
________
