Baseball

 He wore a felt hat

for his early morning beach walk-- an old man as regular in his habits as any tide. He moved slowly, carefully, in incongruous leather shoes under an anvil sky. Later, the oddest thing-- he sat on the sand as if resting, but his shoes were gone and he was as dead. His felt hat had fallen nearby cockeyed, between a cracked shell and a dead fish with a blackened hole in the crown about the size of a cold drink coaster or a baseball.

In August

 In August, the clouds are one-winged birds

collected in a shadow box by boastful head-injured dwarf gods.

They skitter, describing ceaseless circles

as the dwarf gods goad them to fly as they long to.

Storms are the tempers of the shadow box birds.

In August, old men dream of young women 

and young women find themselves shriveled and standing on hard clay.

Everyone is given a shovel and a stethoscope

to listen for thalidomide demons in love with the shadow box birds.

Cicadas amplify the grinding of maddened demons.

In August, weather pattern doctors urge 

tarot card mothers to sleep with bellies full of shadow box birds.

demon doulas with asters in their teeth

sicken gravity with odd fevers and the whole world sways.

Crickets are half birds in the ears of gods, still able to sing, ice pick righteous.

________

for Dverse Poetics "August" hosted by Sanaa Rizvi.

They Are Marching

 They are marching

where the red flowers bloom

They are marching and sometimes stoop to gather

the white and fallen fragments of the moon

They are sleeping

and dying with the hours

they are sleeping and hallucinating sweetly

white swans and lilies in their bowers

They are falling

where bones turn into pennants

They are falling like the spines of dusty hymnals

where angels count forgetfulness as penance.

La Famiglia

Mom would have done well as an underworld figure,
sticking the steel into some poor bastard
then doing the perp walk holding a Le Creuset enameled cast iron skillet in front of her face.

There is something to be said for always seething with petty resentments--
it keeps a girl from going lazy,
idling away the hours wandering the arboreal colonnade
with a peach in one hand and a bible in the other.

Better  to brood under a starved star and crescent moon
bad-tempered as a sick camel,
rooting out infidels from the shadows and making them bow to the east.
After all, what's family for?

Then again, we all have our foolish hour and faint notion,
stumbling along in silver slippers,
carrying the quilled bowling ball handed us by our elders and betters.

Mom, she never believed for one minute in butterball sunshine and rock candy mountains.
She harbored a crow scrabbling just beneath her heart,
telling her quite sensibly to kill that child and kill it quick,
just like she learned at her own mother's knee.

Grandma wore ice boots,
Grandpa had no tongue and a nail through his eye.
Into the world they sent their girl to birth a scapegoat upon an altar
built from fear and silence,
the perfect place to start a family of her own.
______

for Sunday Muse #93, using the word list below for Skylover Word List.

Image at top is Ruby Cruz as teenage Annie Wilkes in "Castelrock." 

And finally, some music to read poetry by.

The Lock

When you put the lock on my tongue,
that was some medieval dentistry;
performed before I knew
about informed consent, 
lawyers, 
mental disorders,
and all the usual childhood stuff.

So, I became a telepath,
screwing with the antenna tv, broadcasting my thoughts,
burning the toast,
giving the garage door St. Vitus Dance,
and dispatching police and fire to our house with my brother's scanner.

Our neighbor three doors down
was the Chief of Police,
and he took me aside with the customary rubber hose.
The lock on my tongue precluded objection or outcry
and besides, I thought it was all normal
how he grunted as he swung,
and then holstered his gun in his face and blew his brains out.
I'll never tell.

You have three choices, you said,
of what to be in life:
a nurse, a secretary, or a hotel maid.
That's when I panicked and started the electric mixer with my mind.
What about hooker, homicide, hag, harridan?
What about paramour, prostitute, pill-popper, parasite?
Who knew I could make the kabob skewers fly through the air like that? 

I stood mute during my trial. 
Let your lawyer do the talking, they told me, 
just as I learned to do at your knee.
Still, I couldn't restrain my nervous habit of jangling the lock on my tongue
during dull moments
like summation and sentencing.
Such a quiet girl, said the warden.
You don't see girls like her very often anymore,
especially doing a quarter at this facility.

It's been years, now.
The other women call me Metal Mouth
and ask if the cat's got my tongue.
They don't know that I learned how to pick the lock last week--
they only know that the guards are having trouble
with the system that seals the doors,
and that the toilets flush by themselves all night
without even anyone's head being shoved into them.

Wait til I can talk, mama.
You always wanted to know what I could have been thinking of--
well, that was it.
Now I'm gonna use my words,
my hour come round at last:
Look, ma! Top of the world, 
and all that silence packed behind one long gorgeous scream. 
______