An Ecclesiastical Fantastical State-Sponsored Royal Catastrophe Depicted Using Origami and Interpretive Dance

 

Used to be, I couldn't get arrested in this town

even if I sent the cops the photos myself, along

with a menu of suggested charges. 

I should have known, even if only on

an instinctual level, when they held the funeral

first, ahead of my arranged wedding

to some rich-ass fake wearing a rubber nose

and glasses disguise. He wanted to experiment,

but I guess he didn't mean on him.

We were such boneheads, we should have

used our noodles and not reenacted the battle 

of Hastings using pipe cleaner royals

but how were we to know they would seize

power the way they did? Now the cops are

accusing me of bags under my eyes

and deploying every trick in the book to

keep Melvin Belli stuck in traffic while some judge

throws the book at me. A best-seller! Is there

to be no end to my suffering? I am branded

with a red-hot haiku and shuffled off to Buffalo

where it snows all summer and there are no

book shops or street carnivals where a girl

could double as a stilt-walker or a ventriloquist,

speaking from on high this cautionary tale

about the dangers of poetry, Bunsen burners, and robed authorities.

_________

for Word Garden Word List--Tomb Sweeping. 

Music: Gong You Can't Kill Me

Love At Zero Or Twenty Atmospheres

We gave each other little sips of air,

enough to keep hearts beating, but

hypoxia made us believe it was love.

Your fallen eyelash black on the pillow

turned to a swan,

our future a loaf.

We called its hissing a song and danced

in the night of its wing, warm and blind.

Our marriage in space, though invalid, was dope ballet.

Now we have a cat, and the swan is dead.

I live in our cat's ear,

you on its tail,

composing music out of echos 

transforming motion into purpose,

all of it faux and yet it takes up every space,

Every thought,

every moment.

So we say, "Look at our cat, stuffed with swan,

his head tilting side to side at us,

isn't he absurd?"

He licks his lips and bats us together,

like dolls in the hands of a misfit girl

Laughing, screaming, friendless except for the stuff she can summon from her damaged and endless imagination.

________

for Sunday Muse 117. 

Graduate Studies

She kissed me, but she 
did it symbolically,
as part of her final exam with Professor Goodbar,
known far and wide 
for his success with electricity, molasses, and girls who wear glasses. 

She attached a papier-mache head to a wheel, and 
turned a crank;
never did a lump of dailies and glue
express such dumbstruck speechless desire for me.
It came around, leaned in by means of a flexible metal vetebra,
and laid one on me.

Oh the hours
we had spent
deposited across her bed like rag dolls,
discussing emotional boundaries,
primitive impulses among Thai villagers,
and deflecting each other's endearments and tender fumblings.

This is when something went wrong.
Just as my Inner Wanton was awakened
by the kiss of her oscillating manufactured surrogate,
in walked Professor Goodbar and oh,
the smile she gave him.
Oh the sugared data.

There's a limit, you know,
to what a girl can take, 
even in the name of course completion.
I realized I had been a dupe,
a foil,
a representation
of fetish and fantasy, of foolery and fuck-headedness,
trotted out like a show pony with a little engine hidden in its tossing head.

Well.

For months, 
we had learned symbology, transference, 
normal and abnormal expression, data collection and interpretation.
But when I brained the Professor with my darling's papier-mache double,
THAT was real and he fell face first into her lap
like unexpected erratum,
mumbling some other woman's name
and it felt good, yes so good, to walk out of there and become a 

guitar shredder or a softball pitcher instead.  
________

For Play it Again, Toads and Hedgewitch's Get Listed challenge.

 
 

 

Love Proofs

"Love is stupid
can't deal with this, bring back Cupid
because in love the same things keep on happening
it's like talking to someone who isn't listening" --"Love Is Stupid" by Zama Nkabinde

"Oh, the lab! The lab!" he cried, exasperated.
"How you love it! Why can't you love me more?"

She answered with questions of her own.
"Why don't you have antlers?
Or orange eyes?"

She ducked neatly when he threw his glass at her,
and refused to fall for the old gambit of a man's tears.

She had tried, you know. 
With the white mice, and then with human subjects,
during wartime, when anything goes.

Findings: crazy can be induced, love cannot.
However, if love occurs independently, crazy follows without effort.

She knows she is supposed to love her husband,
but in fact,
she loves the head bellman at the Ashby-Bancroft Hotel downtown.

At a conference, there he was, 
effortlessly sparking the Tesla coil of her heart.

She will naturally have to give up science now,
obtain a divorce,
and take up something useless and mildly embarrassing--

but thrilling--
like poetry, or
checking into the Ashby-Bancroft out of her right mind,
relying entirely on the anecdotal,
and deaf to contrary data.
________

Find Zama Nkabinde's complete poem HERE. This poem written for Kerry's challenge at Real Toads.

 

Porcupine Ball

We are unadorned and smoky, like our world. I will tell you a story. On Bihan, there is a native plant called a zeshi, which has a fragrant pink-colored bloom. This flower folds over and over on itself, forming a small labyrinth, a maze of sweetness and color hidden from view. Enter the tiny shensh, a poisonous interloper no larger than a passing thought. The shensh crawls down into the zeshi flower and hides itself between the folds, where it begins consuming the zeshi from within. But the zeshi can flood itself with sticky nectar, enough to trap the invading shensh. The zeshi then turns the tables and feeds upon the shensh.

"So, what are you?" asks the human called Ben J. He knows just enough about our social structure to ask me this. He knows that females like me live in groups of about a dozen, with one male. Each female has her own particular place in the group, and brings her own particular talents and strengths. It wouldn't occur to any of us to be jealous of a sister; it would be like being jealous of a part of our own body. On the other hand, outsiders we kill. Ben J. wants to know what my place is in my group. I give him a children's answer:  "I am a storyteller."

Ben J. leans back in his chair, taking up an enormous amount of space without seeming to try. He spins a ring of keys around on his finger, then grins at me, mockingly. He spreads his hands and says, "So tell me a story!" He draws out the last word. 

I tell him, "Once there was a man who searched after the truth, but the more he looked, the less he saw, because his eyes were soft but the truth is hard."

Ben J. just looked at me for a moment, and then tilted his head back and laughed. He casually kicked the bars of my cage with his military-style boot, making a sharp, loud bang, and said, "You are one fucking crazy Zeeb."

They call us Zeebs, for striped creatures on their world called zebras. They call us this because every Bihana--women like me--have dark red skin and bald heads criss-crossed with deep ebony stripes. Every Bihana's stripe pattern is distinct. The only hair we have is a small patch of black at the base of our skulls. Our stripes continue down our spines, finally diminishing at the hips. We have yellow eyes, and bodies that, due to our high metabolisms and our genetics, stay the same as we age. Though to ourselves our appearance is unremarkable, the human males find us fascinating in a strictly physical way. They have no regard for us, but they desire us. We are what they would call voluptuous, and we secrete a pheromone that makes them stupid with desire when we are in season. The rest of the time, the effect is less. That is the only mercy there is, here.

When they came, our male tried to protect us. His name was Meshka, and he was crafty and fearless. The humans were arrogant and out of their element. He used that to ambush them, and he turned a great many of them to nothing but cinders. One night as I lay with him, I kissed a line along the scar across his face. When I spoke in his ear, and the word I spoke was our word meaning peace within one's self; peace within one's world. You don't understand, yet, the power of my words, but you will. It was the best gift I could give him. The humans murdered him the next day, and rounded us up.

Our world is hot and harsh. The main colors here are red and black. The sky stays smoky. We are creatures of this world.

Even in captivity, we have tried to fight them, but it is almost impossible. There are things we can do, but the price is high. One of the humans was running the blade of a knife along the bars of my cage, taunting me, and he managed to cut off the tip of his own finger when the blade slipped in his hand. He screamed. He was bleeding all over, bright red human blood, not the reddish-orange blood that flows in us. The human turned in quick circles, holding his hand and screaming. The fingertip landed near enough to my cage that I reached out and took it. I put it in my mouth. Bihana have the ability to concentrate heat within ourselves, and I made my mouth searing. The stink of burning flesh filled the room, and when he stopped screaming and turned toward me, I spit out the blackened speck that was his fingertip. They starved me for two weeks for that.

My sister came into season and one of the humans let her out and began doing what he pleased with her. He was kissing her hard--something foreign to us--and had pushed her up against the wall. Bihanas have just three fingers, and no thumbs. Instead, we have a sheathed claw that is smooth and black. We are no stronger than human females, but we have this weapon. She took the human by the shoulders, unsheathed her thumb-claws and sank them into his arms. She wouldn't let him go, and she had got him all the way to the bone. Another human came in and hit her with his porcupine ball and down she went.

The humans' favorite weapon is a porcupine ball they carry on their belts. It has a long handle, and a half sphere on the end. When they swing it and it hits someone, dozens of barbed spikes erupt from the ball and into the victim. My sister was put back in her cage with the porcupine ball still in her back. It isn't immediately fatal. Pulling the barbs out takes flesh with them. The wounds become infected, the victim can linger for days, even weeks, and the pain is excruciating. Our cages were close enough together that I could hold her hand. I held it for two human weeks until her blood stopped pulsing in her wrist. One of the things we do not want the humans to know, is that we can cry.

Ben J. is back. He's looking at me and I know the look. I glance at the porcupine ball at his hip. It would do me no good to try to steal it from him, because, as we have learned, they are fingerprint-identified and if anyone but the owner tries to use it, the barbs explode into one's hand. One of my sisters lost her arm this way. Then they shot her in the head, because she wasn't appealing to them anymore.

I told him that I am a story teller. Here is another story, and it's a true one. On Bihan, there were once flying vermin called quanzi. In our world, the air is hot and full of ash and soot. The quanzi found their way into the flesh of damaged throats and bred there. When the larvae hatched, the host would choke violently and the new quanzi would fly out, stronger with each generation. When the quanzi left the dying host, it was called "speaking death", because the first thing young quanzi do is to look for another victim. In time, very few of us were left, but the survivors had a natural immunity, a mutation causing an extra membrane to develop in our throats, and the quanzi starved to death and vanished from our world.

Ben J. is opening my cage. He calls me a Zeeb and holds me by the wrist, hard. I told him that I am a story teller, but that was a children's tale. Here is the truth: I am a shamaness. I am a particular kind of shamaness, as my mother and grandmother were before me. My gift is to manifest words. I can animate any word I choose, and our language is twice as extensive as that of the humans. It begins with the feeling of something gathering itself just beneath my second heart. As I concentrate, it grows stronger, and moves up my body, from the inside. My ears ring and my dark red skin and black stripes shimmer. Then, for a moment, I can't breathe, my throat is blocked, as if it were full of quanzi, but it isn't quanzi, it is the word I have chosen to animate. Finally, it fills my mouth, and when I speak it, whatever word I have chosen manifests itself in physical reality. So, you see, when I spoke in Meshka's ear our word that means peace within one's self; peace within one's world, he had that, there in my arms. I saw it in his face, he was alive with it. That is my gift.

Ben J. is moving against me, calling me "Zeeb bitch" and grunting. I put my lips to his ear. After a while, I feel it gathering inside me. Under my second heart, up my throat, into my mouth. I press my lips to Ben J's ear, so close to his vulnerable human brain, and I speak the words that mean "porcupine ball". He falls instantly to the ground, bright red human blood gushing from his ears, his nose, his ugly mouth, even his eyes. He is dead before he can react, his head riddled and destroyed from the inside. 

I take his keys from his belt. Quietly, I let myself out of the cage room and slowly, silently, make my way down the empty corridor to the door out of this place. I am pushing the door open, almost free, when I hear a voice behind me. It is a human voice saying, "Stop right there, Zeeb." 

One of the guards is swinging his porcupine ball, almost lazily, and walking toward me. His smug face is nearly bored. I have never tried to use my shamanic talent twice in a short time before, but I concentrate as hard as I can. He will be on me in just a few steps. I double over, in pain. It has never been like this before. Still, I concentrate. He is swinging the porcupine ball, it will only be a few seconds before I  feel it bite into my body. The word I have chosen rises up in my throat, choking me for a moment. Then it is in my mouth, the word I have summoned, the word that I am forbidden to speak this way, but which I am speaking now as the human takes aim at me, a smile at the edge of his lips.

I speak the word, the word that manifests and animates the small thing that will bring down this human, this place, this entire world except for me and my sisters:

"Quanzi".           

some facts about milk

Milk is made from stars;
Milk is liquefied stars.

Jars for milk are made from glass;
Glass is made when lightning touches sand.

Jarred milk is most similar to the Moon;
Jarred milk wants to be the Moon.

One becomes an astronaut by drinking milk from jars;
Inside each astronaut: stars.
______

a list poem for "Are You Listing?"

and 55 words counting the title for G Man.

 

mad skillz

Forget the bathing suit--
burn it.
It is always stormy in my world;
the trees are like crack ballerinas--
never still.

I wonder if you could help me--
you, with your mad skills.
I don't like grease, unless it's in the pan;
but I do admire arcane knowledge--
such as rests better on a girl.

Take a look, touch inside--
be a whisperer for my ride.
Smaller hands are better fitting;
prove that purring
suits this kitten.
_________

Alternate Science

Uterus.
Cervix.
Vulva.
They sound like they would be floating in space,
reclining in rings,
or swept by storms.

Named after Goddesses,
or the women of myth,
they are beyond the arc
of any ordinary thing except curiosity.

Now, comes the Traveler,
lately of places not certainly known--

blue-eyed,
delivered to the breast,
astonished.
_________

for Margaret Bednar's  artistic interpretations challenge at Real Toads, and for G Man's Friday 55!

acrylic art at top by Chelsea Bednar.

 

Bombyx Mori

because, I wanted to be Hedgewitch, for one poem.

There is no sight,
no marvel for fingertips
to rival my love, langorous
in her gorgeous silk kimono.

I am perfect for her, because
I am the small white child of parents who could neither fuck nor feed
without the assent and assistance
of a greedy audience.

I devour each tidbit I am given,
multiform,
from the mulberry leaves in my love's singular garden.
My line is univoltine--
romantics of the most deluded stripe.

Behold me, my love.
I have consumed your casual offerings in their thousands,
and from deep within myself,
can now spin out the most magnificent and coveted stuff.

I will wrap this poem around myself like second skin--
cell memory sings to me of transformative sleep,
but also of the boiling pot.
Now is the time for you to scald me,
kill me,
devour me in turn;
What sort of sweet grotesquery can it be,
to wear another's work
as one's own beauty?

You must forgive me if there is now a break in my lineage;
I have hidden my cocoon in solitary shadows, where,
though I stir within its walls at your calling,
I am not fool enough to reveal myself.

One day, you will look up to see
Bombyx mandarina
dull and gray,
common and beneath regard,
but able to catch the waft from the pretty fan you so desultorily wave,
to rise, departing,
and fly.
______

Notes:

Bombyx mori, the domestic silkworm, is the caterpillar of the domestic silkmoth, which cannot fly, nor feed itself, nor survive outside of human care. When the caterpillars reach the pupa stage, they spin raw silk around themselves to form a cocoon. This cocoon is then boiled in water, and the heat kills the pupa inside, and makes the silk easier to unravel. Pupae dishes may be served and eaten.

univoltine--breeding once yearly

Bombyx mandarina is the wild silkmoth. This unremarkable-looking moth is able to fly and to survive independently.   

 

Kimberly & the Atomic Bomb

When Kimberly saw the atomic flash,
she didn't really care;
it just meant no more Gas N Go,
no more washing her hair.

No more filling out college apps,
no more diet fads and
no more having to hear that one sucky song til she pukes.

She thought of the times her mother had told her
how she came before she was due--
so tiny and fragile and blue--
but she said she had known her Kimmy was a fighter and would prove all the doctors wrong by surviving.

When Kimberly saw the atomic flash,
she sat on her bed and looked at the backs
of her hands as if she had never seen them before,

And the moon glowed red over the Gas N Go
like a rose on fire in the night.
_____

for DOLN #65.

Science For Girls

Water vapor in the cloud--
Same-same, baby,
You can't choose out one from within the other.

The water drop rolls and rises inside the cloud--
Sun, Moon,
Still call strong and she answers.

Water drop cloaks herself
In more and more of herself--
She rolls again and falls;
The Earth calls, so Cloud and Moon let go,

But still they cover her with themselves
Until the next roll and turn,
Feeling each other in the quick of each other
Always.
______

Lineage

A baby was born and born on fire.
They said, "Here is your burning baby.
Here is your infant in flames."
They dropped it into its mother's arms
Like a crying comet without a name.

"Shhh," mama crooned,
Her arms gone to cinders
Right down to the bone.
"Leave us, you assholes," she said to the doctors.
"Leave us to smolder.
Leave us alone."

The child was a girl, of course.
A little star,
And though to cradle her was to roast on a spit,
The mother held her,
And damn any do-gooder,
To hell with any child welfare fuck
Who tried to interfere.

There are kinds of love.
Some warm,
Some reward,
Some scorch.
In time, the mother was nothing but ash,
But by then the girl was grown and rose
Five hundred feet into the sky
Like a mushroom cloud sharp
And bright enough to blind.

Look at the doctors, how they fumble;
The ministers, too, with their useless bibles.
Now comes the day for an infant in flames,
A baby born and born on fire.
"Look," says the new mother,
"How red-orange limns
My doubled and darling
Yellow-white twins."
_______

Ask Mittens The Cat Your Metaphysical Questions

There are things which are known,
Clear,
Predictable and provable--
A carton of milk left out on the counter
In the sun from the streaky window
For a week
While its owner pores over ancient religious texts
Or surfs porn
In an access of unnatural zeal,
Will roil with unspeakable rot
And spoilage to turn one's skin gray.

Such is the rational world.

Enter "Mittens" the psychic cat.
Mittens knows
In the morning
That Fat Henry from downstairs will have a coronary
In front of Wheel Of Fortune
That evening,
But she refuses to say.

The things Mittens sees
And the things Mittens is privy to,
Make God look like a piker
Viewing smoke in a darkened room
Through the keyhole.

Then there is the benighted general run of humanity.

They know only what is spoon fed to them
By pomaded newsmen,
The terrors instilled in them
By hovering, neurotic parents,
And the odd fact picked up
From graphic novels
Found accordioned at the filthy kiosk where the number ten bus pauses
To consume them whole.

Turn to Mittens the psychic cat.

Is your life a blue diamond
In a rose bloom
In a beautiful woman's hand?
Is your heart
A hawk through the smashed window
Of the two car garage of time?
Mittens knows,
But Mittens will never say.

Tough shit, Princess.

Truth is a black ink riddle
Written on a crow's wing
By a blind man.
You could break your fingers and your neck
Trying to read that braille
On the fly.
Leave it to Mittens
Whose eyes are designed for the lunacy of night.

_____


for dverse poetics

Raining Up

It rained up,
Everything launching into the sky--
Leaving the earth a featureless desert much like your heart.

And the one
you were convinced
I loved better than you?

I love her better than you.

She makes everything weightless,
Fantastic;
It rains up.

Hell yeah.
_________

Love Still

I'm thinking of someone I loved--

Love still.

I'm looking at the vines that grow on the west side of the yard--

Why do they reach out to the second post, or the third?

Why does the simple painted wood invite the seeking curls?

Why are they there at all,

With their red stems,

And new green leaves?

Why am I,

With my old sweater and my melancholy?



I'm thinking of someone I loved--

Love still.

Shouldn't love be a thing in motion, like an arm reaching

With fingers open

Welcoming?

I am thinking of the places where the vines don't grow,

Because someone who doesn't care for vines has cut them,

Or because mulberries and wild strawberries were already there.



I am thinking of someone who loved me--

Loves me still.

I am thinking of her face, and her dark hair long that enchants me.

I am wondering how the vines know where is empty air and where is something solid?

I am thinking how the afternoon turns, becoming dusk.



I am thinking of the vines, and the bruisy evening sky.

I am thinking of someone I loved--

Love still.

________

Small Talk

Don gloves before handling porcupines;
Dark glasses when in love with the sun--

Protect virtue with dozens of petticoats;
Slouch in doorways and call, to meet men.

Never trust captains of ferry boats;
Feign boredom when purchasing wine--

During lovemaking, do not consult your notes,
And keep your damn mitts off what's mine.

_____

for magpie 46

My Science Report, by Shay Caroline

Clouds do not have bones,
And so live in the sky.

If they fall,
They will not break anything,
And when they fall we call it
Rain.

After
The
Rain,
They cannot find their bodies again,
And so they
Disappear.

Blue skies do not have clouds.
Clouds do not have bones.
That is all I have to say.

_____