Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun rides again.

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Ice

 

Winter went too far that year
like a friend who shows her ugly side,
as heedless as some smartphone fuck in a bookstore
as numb and hard as a cop's baton.

Southern beauty, transplanted lady
brought here as a baby, 
my English walnut tree was shivered--shocked--
a dazed involuntary wandering the halls of summer for years after.

This year, unfed, the bandit squirrels stopped knocking down 
her new growth bouquets.
This year her gown is lush, her branches heavy with baubles,
the first walnuts in five years.

I love to sit beneath her, bathed in green
and the susurration of her clustered feathers.
No silent era star wearing ostrich plumes
could compete with her now--she preens in the pleasant weather.

This spring, she is an Impressionist lady 
holding a parasol over me as I am shivered--shocked--
by my country showing her ugly side
my sanctuary soft and sweet, the future hard as a cop's baton.

________

for Dverse--"A View of One's Own" hosted by Dora. 

The images are taken by me, of the walnut tree in my yard. 

Music: Glee cast Don't Make Me Over




Saturday, June 7, 2025

Word Garden Word List--Anne Sexton

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Word Garden Word List poetry prompt. I'm a day early with it since I didn't post one last week. Our source this time is Anne Sexton's collection entitled To Bedlam and Part Way Back. 

Anne Sexton

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others as you are able, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. This prompt remains active through next Saturday. 

Your List:

animals
begat
calling
carvings
cures
elephants
erasers
hotel
jackpot
madness
mine
noon
poets
postmarks
radio
roller coaster
rowboat
silk
spoons
wooden

My Child

 

My child was born over the radio at noon
calling, crying, appearing--clearly mine.
She displayed an instant madness, an affinity for the moon
accepting only pomegranate and warm plum wine
as Nurse counted up the medications and the spoons.
We communicate by carvings, deep and raw
and love words mercurial and gritty as a dune,
that respect no wound, no custom, no law.

My elephant child, heavy, hunted, wise
eludes rubber-handed teachers of the exhausted strike
arriving in little rowboats in full courtly disguise
to mine my little darling as she rides her phantasmal bike
down to the grave of stars to kiss the thing that dies
in a tiny wooden cradle beneath a concrete sun
to bring it back, to make it rise
and then her work is done.

Come, child of animals, black earth and fire
to the shelter I have cobbled from discarded turtle shells
where poets burn on pages, porches, pyres
and all variety of heavens, limbos, hells
to arrange your dolls named Judgement and Desire
who sit on silken pillows or in coffins fit with bells
to call their mothers, those beauties, belles and hags
combined into an advocate for my child with tongue flat-felled
by a celebrated seamstress, dumbly mute and dressed in rags.
_____

for Word Garden Word List--Anne Sexton

Music:

Sin City 


Sunday, June 1, 2025

Cowgirl's Lament

 

Yippee yi o
and ki yi yay
I've got just one 
more thing to say--
Please don't let me
die here all alone.

Across the mesa  
and through the pass
Old Scratch has gone and 
nailed my ass--
Please don't let me
die here all alone.

Around the campfire
with beer and beans
Who knows what the
hell it means--
Please don't let me
die here all alone.

Kiss me, cowboy
and trim the wick
Had no notion
I was even sick
Please don't let me
die here all alone.

Here's a letter
here's my will
The night is silent
sweet and still--
Please don't let me
die here all alone.
_______

No List today--under the weather. Back next week. 

Sunday, May 25, 2025

Word Garden Word List--Bittersweet

 

Hello my little holiday weekend warriors! You may be suffering from too much potato salad or the aftereffects of that spiked lemonade, but I know what real  suffering is. I have just hate-read to the bitter end of Michael Ondaatje's overwritten, torpid, preachy, over-ornamented, meandering, disjointed mess entitled The English Patient. Now, I usually cull your weekly List from something I have recently read, but that turkey is snug in the bin and is not ever seeing the light of day again and soooo... I have decided to feature and old favorite, Nevada Barr's Bittersweet. 


Nevada Barr is known for her mystery/thrillers set in various national parks and those are fine reads, but Bittersweet is a love story between two women in the old west. I love it and thank my BFF for gifting it to me. 

Nevada Barr

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new, original poem of our own. Then simply link up, visit others as you are able, and then sit back and read something more like Bittersweet, and less like The English Patient. (I did love the movie, though.) This prompt remains active through next Saturday.

And now, your List!

autumn
basket
bible
birds
candy
crush
doctor
dreams
frizzy
glasses
honey
kitten
mail
moon
onions
shyness
soft
stars
texts
watercolor

Greenhouse Afternoon

 

There should be a bible for things like this--
something dependable
something I could grab onto
when I feel bewildered,
   dizzy,
from your smile and your scent
when you stand closer
   than I expect.

Such a bible would have shed its
shall-nots
in favor of
more love-thy-neighbor
   especially
when the sky is full of soft stars
and you remove my glasses
   along with my reserve.

This bible would be full of watercolors
and nested in by drowsy birds.
This bible would be
   lit like a greenhouse afternoon
or suggested in midnight indigo.
Lay hands on my shyness
   and let me lay my burden down--
turn me to the text of oh-gosh-yes
   like a prodigal
whose lips can finally confess.
_______

for Word Garden Word List--Bittersweet.

Music: Denise King Say You Say me





Monday, May 19, 2025

My Gibbet


My gibbet is a fine and private place
where a lady may tarry of a summer afternoon
elevated and untouchable--
an ideal love just out of reach
like fruit for Tantalus, all pointless sweetness.

Allen Ginsberg appears from out of the crowd,
pink as a schoolmarm, fat as a Christmas goose
carrying his harmonium
singing about plutonium,
barefoot as any angel, toking on the Golden Blunt.

He looks up, mistaking me for a caught kite
dangling above the street in my gibbet
making other women's children
point and cry
demanding candy or weather reports.

Someone climbs up and ties tin cans
to the bottom of my gibbet
in an atmosphere of giddy holiday.
I die and begin to stink
pieces falling away like confetti.

Here I sway to this very day, high above 
the Emily Dickinson Parkway
a paragon of virtue and demure reserve,
dead as hell
black as a bowling ball
ring still on my finger, an ingenue of the afterlife, 

until gentrification when they'll take me down
because gibbets are out, they're upsetting,
like poetry, 
like dead dodos
like buskers in the subway, beautiful, buried, irrelevant.
_______