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.
________
Violet Ward's mother wasn't a smoker, but she got a cancer anyway.
Her skin was white and papery, despite her (relative) youth.
Her hair was brittle cellophane,
dishwater blonde, with a gold stripe around it from some kind of cranial jaundice.
At night, she smoked herself empty.
There are degrees of empty,
and sometimes empty just purely hates to be alone.
My dog loved Violet Ward.
He had made a hole in the upstairs screen, as if it were the ozone,
and he would run to stick his great head out, at a word from her.
Sometimes she would bring her friend to see The Dog From The Sky.
They stood like stargazers by the fence, looking up.
He barked a blessing.
It was a pure, fine thing.
Violet Ward had a chow chow named Gemini,
but one day the men with their loops came and chased him around his own yard,
and took him away.
That night, Violet sat outside cradling a broken radio, and the sound that came
from her poor raw throat was unlike any I have heard.
There is no frequency for that.
It would break the air and stop hearts cold if it weren't contained.
"Shut up!" screamed Violet Ward's mother, in the public interest.
My dog's name was Sunny, and she was his faithful moon.
She called, he came, and he shone,
into her frozen world, as he had into mine.
Years later, I told my night-frightened son that Sunny could banish ghosts and devils,
and this was the God's Honest.
I had seen him do it a million times.
Because she was full of cancer, if nothing else,
Violet Ward's mother made an heirloom of emptiness
and screamed at her daughter to come collect it.
"You stupid little fuck!"
And so emptiness took root and went to work from within.
Violet Ward had a dark doll she called Nigger Baby.
I sometimes saw her come out the side door,
wiping tears with the back of one hand,
and shaking the shit out of Nigger Baby with the other.
Sometimes she bashed Nigger Baby's stuffed brains in against the side of the house.
"Bad Nigger Baby!" she would hiss quietly, so her mother wouldn't hear--
her mother with the perpetual headache and the cancer heart.
Every time Nigger Baby hit the siding, I flinched.
I would hold Sunny and breathe carefully around the broken thing in my chest.
I left Texas, and what became of Violet Ward stays at the edges of my dreams,
out of reach.
Sunny died and went straight to Paradise.
I finally got sober.
I had a child of my own and raised him, and I hope I did more good than harm.
His dolls were called Stretch Armstrong and Donatello.
When I still went to Mass, I prayed for Violet Ward, for years.
I hope she found a glow-dialed radio
to watch over her with Golden Light
and play only the songs that Violet loves--
Maybe Mitch Ryder--
and that she is all right.
________
Everything in this poem really happened, a long time ago, in Texas.
For Marian's "Dead City Radio" and Kim Nelson's "Violet" challenges at Real Toads.
It's Mother's Day.
Lambs, I'm so excited! It is time once again for the Letter Carriers' Food Drive! This Saturday, put out cases of 1929 Chateau Rothschild, semi trailers filled with beluga caviar, or whatever other trifles you can spare! It's all for a good cause...to get the hungry to stuff something in their whiney pie holes and leave us in peace to play Mah Jong already!
However, some mail carriers seem to have an attitude. Last year, I left 70 cases of premium ice cream out by the mailbox, and my lazy, overpaid, nasty little mail lady left it there! She mumbled something unpleasant about it being "perishable." Perishable? So's your job, honey. Who sends anything by snail mail anymore? I always just roll up notes and stick them in one of the help's collar, then send them off, with bus fare, to wherever I want the note to go.
Anyway, give give give! Oh, I feel saintly now, like Jesus, except with better bust and thighs.
Air Kisses,
Babs
(Babs St Argent is the gal with it all, from the late Objets D'art blog! This post appeared there one year ago under the title "Pheasant Under Glass For The Hungry". Fireblossom would have posted a beautiful new original poem instead, but she will be lugging &%$#@ canned goods around all day and must conserve her delicate self for this undeserved punishment worthy task.)
I brought a music box in from the snow and raised it.
It called to me in the deep blue nights, and I wrapped my body around it to give it lullabies.
It gave me being needed, and there we were--
flesh and cylinder--
a blizzard of simple melodies in the middle of the night.
_____
55 words for the G Man.
