Scrapbook

 

Two parents, tidy as mints on a pillow,

produce three children who float into the world

like bewildered but bright confetti. 

The first lives inside a camera,

clothed in instructions and operating

the mechanism from within.

The second lives in the courtyard,

raised remotely from an upstairs window

by the detached shadow of the first.

The third grows inside a smoker

and can barely see. It is assumed she will be

a servant or a sparrow, but she is a fissure.

The second hates the first

and hides inside the family car,

finally using it to elope with an accident.

The first is made of mirrors,

the second of fists. The third grows

eyes on her palms and holds them up.

The first is successful and becomes a living myth.

The second is successful and has a skin of diamonds.

The third is on fire, shifting in the wind.

This is the story of the farmer's wife

she cut out their hearts with a carving knife

have you ever seen such a sight in your life

as this family, so proper and nice?  

________

for Word Garden Word List--The Silent Patient. 

Five Reasons Why We Divorced

 

1. The phase of the moon. 

      Full in perpetuity inside your head,

     disturbing your vision from behind,

     creating avid ghosts. 

     Me, caught in tides, no handhold,

     every current riding over my tongue,

    a deep-water language for one.

2. The snowdrops in the front garden.

     You, the monarch of sweet beginnings,

     pale with presentiments, failing

     and dying in the first strong light.

    Me, the Queen of January, lover

    of the silent empty street, made 

    nervous by crowds and heat. 

3. The thespian masks on our wall.

     You were the thousand-in-one,

     going for a glass of water and

     returning a complete stranger.

    Me, forgetting what was real or scripted,

    playing a part, blundering in borrowed limbs,

    smiling, crying, ad-libbing, hating it.

4. The crow feathers on my desk.

     You liked doves, wanted everything white,

     like living in a child's storybook, letting

    someone else absorb all the splinters.

    Me, a dark star happiest at height, 

    but having foresworn the breeze

    except the one in my dreams. I called

   all night, lips never moving at all.

5. The child between us and of us.

     The Viking funeral you loaded

     your guilt upon, disguised as

     kindness, consuming itself brightly.

    Me, trying to be sober, trying 

   to be better than the mother

   I had myself, and failing, failing,

   until our child needed me most

and I swam out to him, with my real face, and a ticket out of there. 

________

for What's Going On? Fifteen Reasons 

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List is still open through Sunday. 

Music: Roberta Flack Just Like A Woman

   

     

Fireman

 

You're right, I was here.

The cats let me in, they are as untrustworthy 

as a broken elevator.

You're right, I had hidden

pieces of myself, like a nightbird's nest

right under your nose.

Sorry about the fire department.

Sorry about my dual nature, always waving my arms

for balance like a drunken signalman.

You know that they burn

saints and witches alike, and me most of all,

but thieves stole the taps

And you just sat there,

like Buddha of the first editions, plastered in poetry,

a wall unto yourself.

You're right, I meant me

but the cats advised me to say you, over and over

begging to be let in

then out

then in

just like them.

The firemen saved them--

the cats, the other tenants, the stairwells and stars.

Me? I died in the fire I had set because I was in pain, 

did not know how to end things,

and you were not there to get that blasé look on your face

and put me out. 

________________

for Sunday Muse #261. 

top image created with Bing A.I.

Molasses Girl

 

The starlings. They protect my heart.

Kiss me and you can feel them fluttering.

"Aren't you happy?" you ask.

It is only the starlings rising in black unison

because your desire has disturbed them.

I am a molasses girl. I am what is left

after refinement. My heart is a vat.

Open it and drown

in starlings sugar-drunk and rushing

headlong into whatever will make you go away.

If I talk in my sleep near dawn,

it is just the starlings screaming from every tree.

I will bathe in the oven,

until my body is a cookie you can carry.

My familiars will follow, testing, screeching, objecting.

They are my dark dowry, the price you pay for more.

________

for Dverse "Strange Houses" (of Lee Madgwick) The art at top used with permission.

Music: Jonatha Brooke "Made of Gold"

Carrie Nation (or How I Became An Interesting Girl)

 I don't like it either, sometimes,

but there it is, like a cop 

parked behind a billboard

or

a funnel blowing the barn apart.

Now here's this guy,

He needs a drink before he spits it out,

termites working in every smile,

his suit already pooling in the chair.

And now I'm the one, the home town

you can never go back to.

"You've changed," is usually spoken with that face one saves

for finding out your sports hero shoots skag

or the sweet old lady next door has renters under the floor.

Rivers flow,

rats run up the pole.

Clocks tick,

clouds form and blow.

Carrie Nation knew it was true,

as Lizzie B. did, too,

that the most interesting person in the room

is always the one swinging the axe.

_______

for Sunday Muse #185.

Silent Bird

There is a silent smoke-bodied bird

in a stone nest

on a broken branch

overseen by a gape-eyed imbecile.

"All hail," say purple asters.

Hollyhocks drip with faked tears.

Sunflowers babble.

In evening,

all blooms combust to ash.

A silent smoke-bodied bird 

lays dead eggs 

in a broken bell

with a millstone tongue.

Multi-mothered monsters calve.

______

for Friday 55, hosted by the haughty and magnificent Hedgewitch. ;-)

civil defense

concussions rain dust

on flowers in a fruit jar

steady in my palm

____

a fauxku for Out Of Standard "Gimme (Fallout) Shelter"

the image is from the movie "10 Cloverfield Lane"

Nydia

Nydia

It was a dark and stormy night, and I,
pale as a sugar moon,
stepped my inviolate and ivory self out into it.

All the ashes flicked 
from all the cigarettes ever smoked 
by every cabaret singer who ever was,
are small-town stuff
compared to Vesuvius' great burning wave arriving
at out tender bare feet
and above our perfectly sculpted, stupid upturned faces.

My name is Nydia--
I am both blind as a bat and deaf as a white cat,
despite any contrary impression I may have given

All those times we lounged,
and I seemed to listen raptly
to your cocky prating,
my lord and master, purchaser of all my various blooms--

Here I stand in the ignited whirlwind,
with my porcelain fingers wrapped around some random staff,
such that you fly to me in a jealous rage.

In a thousand years, when they find us,
cooked in close embrace,
they will say,
"Behold the low one,
who, by this high one, was owned."

It will be so cute, how you'll think it's obvious
what they mean.
_______

For Artistic Interpretations With Margaret.

 Nydia, the blind flower seller, was a popular character from the 1834 novel "Last Days of Pompeii" by English playwright and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton.  Rogers depicted her wandering through the wreckage of Pompeii as the erupting volcano Mount Vesuvius destroys the city.  Her staff and acute sense of hearing guide her around the destruction.  Nydia, a slave, listens intently for the voice of her aristocratic master with whom she has fallen in love. 

Bulwer-Lytton is infamous for having penned the line "It was a dark and stormy night"

white bird

i was in bed
when a buzzing curled inside my ears--
it may have been music i forgot to turn off, in the other room.
it may have been roadwork down in the dirt-turned, workboot street.
it may have been your name
spoken from my dreams by a female priest,
wearing denim and flannel,
on her day off, smoking on the steps of Saint T's.

i get so confused--
one rain drop and i'm growing green skin,
building arks,
playing midwife, saving the world.
then again,
there are days when i would barter the world away
just to be in your arms.

i grew you a song,
carefully,
in a coffee can on my window sill.
that spring, each white bloom
had dove's wings and flew
across all of this blue-edged snag-hearted geography we call living.
i told them to go to you.
i gave them sweet jam messages.
i leaned out my window and screamed, hurting my throat for a week,
and then i slept until winter.

i woke in bed
with a buzzing in my ears.
solitude embraced me from both sides,
whispering a bitter catechism.
they hid your name.
they silenced all music.
they said, "you are ashes, dear,
nothing more."

that was when my bird-blooms came back.
all of them, soft and lovely and innumerable,
each of them bearing your reply--
you said,
"these came from you and to you i return them."
i finally understood, and that was when i went up,
vaporizing my weird guests but sparing the birds,
scorching out poems like some kind of vengeful torch.

my immediate world reduced to ache and feathers, 
carbon and snow,
swirling black
white
black
white
black
white

magic i own
magic i birth
magic i can't stop.
blue
indigo
black

white.
______

for Kerry's black-and-white challenge at Real Toads.

 

poem girl

packed deep in the roots of my teeth,
i keep everything i long to say, but don't.
i am as pleasant and sweet as a drink of anti-freeze--
kiss me, i hold thirty-two volcanoes. 

it turned cold, but you had your scarf,
your soft gloves,
your navy pea coat;
what did you need me for?
nothing.

longing cracks my bones open
as if they had been dropped from height by birds.
impossibility is a handy rock--
bombs away, 
the fall,
the split,
the blood-heart in the white shell.
i am a love letter written in angel spit,
misdelivered into hell.

i thought of you last night
and moaned.
there is no other mercy like your hair, your voice, your body;
i am krakatoa
i am a siberian fireball--
my ribs lay flattened for miles,
they heard my stupid whimpering on the streets of paris,
and the skies over new york stayed dusky and dark at noon.

i'm just a girl,
in love with you.
you have a husband you keep close like a voodoo doll--
you hang your heart on him like a blue star.
here is my smile,
empty and harmless.
here are my words, crimson-black on the page,
and when they hit the sea, the sea boils
and every beautiful creature
every mermaid
every siren
every humble shell
is turned to ashes with the expression of my useless flow of sorrow.
_______

image from weheartit.com

My Love, Alexandrian

My Love is as smooth as the most beautiful lie,
and as merciless, and raven-clawed, as absolute truth.

See the hunk of shit she drives,
and the impossible perfection of her elaborate expletives,
caressed like sleepy babies
on her lips until the language seems
almost holy.

She licks me with her tiger tongue,
wearing me away;
she planes me, layer by layer,
until I am nothing but shavings,
fragrant and useless and
utterly at the mercy of gravity, and her moods.

I am a single leaf of milled paper,
carried like a new future in a thylacine's mouth.
My Love, she is the burning library at Alexandria,
sending everything she can so magnificently be
directly Heavenward, but piecemeal,
as ashy birds,
word by
word by
gorgeous
word.
_____

the thylacine was a wolf-like marsupial which lived in great numbers in Australia and New Zealand, but which is now thought to have been hunted to extinction. The thylacine had the widest gape of any known mammal. 

The library at Alexandria was one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, a repository of the world's knowledge up to that time. It burned.
_____ 

Envoys

There was Campbell's soup in the cupboard.
Velveeta cheese.

TV spoke the expected language.
Street signs were green.

13 years together. Innocents. Envoys.
Futures negotiable. Like toys.

As we bargained the trappings,
our Masters sacrificed us.

How fooled we were
by the familiar, my dear.

We didn't know how foreign we'd become,
or that the well-meaning die here.
________

Siobhan

Siobhan the neighborhood Goddess
makes cupcakes out of kerosene
and frosts them with a cigarette lighter.

What that girl won't do next.

It was nobody's birthday,
but still--
the mix, the bowl, the eggs with their soulful yellow eyes.

Siobhan picks up frequencies in her fingers.
If she boxes your ears,
you'll hear music.

Everybody out,
the food is on fire!
But wait...
wait...
the only way out is to overspill our sweet white skins.

Siobhan the neighborhood Goddess
is an Irish girl.
Cops and firefighters jump from every picture frame.

Now comes the miracle--
the little paper baking cups in their thousands
rise as fire birds!

Siobhan lifts her hands,
and they recognize their song
at once.
_______

image by laurent chehere.