On the thin edge of November
smoky air flirts with freezing and the stunned birds
seem to lean forward on the precipice of a warning cry.
Last night I dreamed of you,
my chest a redding leaf poised at a point of immobility.
A wind came up.
Windows grayed.
I rose, denying ghosts.
(Even yours.)
----------
From the Ashes by Christie L. Starkweather
The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
full of gunpowder and honey.
We see everything onrushing,
through the prism of a bus windscreen,
drinking to stop the chatter,
always bumming a dollar and then drawing on it,
turning it otherworldly, gorgeous, useless.
Dead brothers rise up from their graves
as we try to have dinner, watch tv.
"They're weird," say the women
in their housedresses and galoshes,
whose dreams are unyielding as can openers.
A woman is expected to be beautiful,
a man stoic.
Where does that leave us?
Gauguin never came around again after the thing with the ear.
Mothers die, Lorca wants to kiss you,
and Diego fucks everything that's not nailed down.
We live in a snow globe inside a tornado funnel.
We are divine strays
leaving tracks on new sidewalk,
ducking thrown shoes from a holy or profane hand.
Here we are in Vinnie's car,
seeing swirls and jagged edges,
bizarre permutations and fields of flowers
in some cop's mirror shades.
The New Mexico night seems to bless us
as the cop lets us off with a warning,
his common brand of gibberish
as foreign to us as ours is to him.
_______
for Sunday Muse #131.
It bakes. Time is the oven.
Like that? ^^
Fuckinay.
You're lucky to know me.
You could have been hit by an SUV
and ended up in the hands of a quack hiding from the Anti-Defamation League.
Geez, would you look at the weird shit in jars on his shelf
(If he existed.
If that driver hadn't swerved.)
Luck is the residue of design
like jam on a knife
at the breakfast table of infinity.
Whoa, nice, right? ^^
You were lucky when you ran out of here
carrying all that shit.
Lucky traffic was light.
Lucky the sun was up.
Lucky you got me to sign my (brilliant, fantastic) book
before you ran out of here like a chicken from the skillet,
jabbering about luck
and some other unkind hoo-ha about the funny papers.
________
for Sunday Muse #130.
A Wartime Love: A World War Two Drama by Shiralyn J. Lee
good boots in spring, cowls or hoods in fall.
Mothers kill,
that is what I know.
Fathers carry vinyl primer and epoxy out to the slipway.
I played cards with my father, we lit the diamonds.
Mother was the ace of spades, a concentrated gravity.
Only flame can light a lantern, though fuels vary.
Throw flour on a grease fire,
tarpaulins across fresh graves.
On the water, my father and I,
we kept our lights above the horizon.
Mother called me by the wrong name
and sent hook-tides to force me back.
There was no electricity,
she had stolen voltage from the fuse box to commit suicide.
My brothers arranged the funeral, one sad, one stoic.
I danced a sailor's hornpipe,
one arm in the air,
the other on my hip.
Later, I sat on a rock in the rain like a mermaid.
Wear oilskin for weather, tie your hair back for wind.
Cry if you need to while cleaning the oarlocks,
and recite by rote the lakes you know
by temperature, reputation, and depth.
________
for Sunday Muse #129.
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
Twice each year,
we migrate.
As a child my parents drove
from Mexico to Michigan every spring,
then back in fall.
Dirt roads, blacktop,
Nesbitt's orange
and Stroh's Bohemian for dad.
"Again? For fuck's sake," says my sig other, encouragingly.
Sig Other is sober, stable,
uncomplaining.
I gift him this shared happiness
and kindly drive.
______
for Sunday Muse #128 and Flash 55.