Beauty

 I stole beauty from another girl--

Ripped it right out of her hands
In a hail of cosmetics and hairspray,
Then ghosted away with it to my underground lair.
But when I tried to bash it open,
The lock wouldn't budge
And anyway, it wasn't my size.


I took it to my mother's house and dropped it dead center on her holiday table--
Shrieking, I raked my broken fingernails right down to the bone of love and hatred that props us together, and she
Embraced
The locked
Foreign
Beauty that I ripped off from some bitch on the bus,
And said, "Daughter,
At last!
Welcome home."

___________

for What's Going On? "Beauty"

The Lion In The Goldfish Bowl

"Poor great dull thing," they said about the lion in the goldfish bowl.

"She's out of place," they said about the lion on Main Street with bowl shards in her skin.

"Wtf?" they said about the lion at the dinner table, the date who won't be back.

"She's cool as fuck," said another lion, with golden eyes.
_____

Off the top of my kitty-cat head, for MZ's challenge at Real Toads. 48 words. There were two more but I ate them.

A Ngorongoro Nativity

If you are a Cape Buffalo,
the first thing you do in life
is fall.

For your mother, there is no hospital bed,
no breathing exercises, no Lamaze,
no idiot husband with a video cam.
Stoic, she stands and gives you to the ground.

This stunned moment of grass and hoof-shadow
is the last rest you will get,
Little Runner.

The only other place to lay your head
for the rest of your life,
will be that final hour of stifled surrender
in the lion's mouth.
_______

For dolls, part 2, at Real Toads. This doll was created by Becca Nenow. I don't think she probably intended it to be a Cape Buffalo, but this is how it spoke to me.

And, from Detroit's own...

 

Shay's Rebellion

Plenty people
Tried to bang me down in a box
At the bottom of the sea
With a thousand million locks...

Mama was their Queen.
She tell me do right,
And toe the line,
Or she smash me to smithereens.

Sorry, Mama,
I'm a flock that scatters and spins;
Turns once, turns twice,
Then comes together again.

I always been this way.
Don't cotton much
To rules and such.
That's all I got to say.
_____

Thanks to Cloudia, of Comfort Spiral blog, who sent the kitty pic, and wished me a happy anniversary of Shays Rebellion!

Top photograph: Charlotte Gainsbourg
 

Blame

You can't blame it all on me.
I broke that bottle square on your boat's fat beak,
And looked damned fine doing it, too.

Is it my fault
That a little pink ribbon dragged her down?
Was it my doing
That the captain you engaged was a freak, a fiend, a fool?

Tell those idiots to lay their tubas down.
The breeze is picking up,
Everyone is heading home,
And not another soul blames me, not one.

So hit me or kiss me,
But don't stand there stupid
Like a dressmaker's dummy.

It's easy to react after the fact,
But at least I twitched,
At least I spit in the wind and went whistling past the graveyard;
If you sink, you sink alone...
Don't try to blame that stuff on me.
_________ 

Also, find my new prose poem at Night Blooms, HERE.

The Far Garden

When I was young, I asked,

Why are my arms made of blackberry vines?

And why do I

Most love to sit

In the far garden filled

With strawberries and mint?



And why do I have

Cat-tail colored hair?

Why is the thunderhead

A black mother bear?

Why is my skin filled with restless blue lightning

And the pull of the moon?



You dreamed it, child--

Is all that I

Was told, and it's

A sin to lie

A sin to lie.



When I was young, I ran

Away through the wheat under bright summer sun

Until I was alone

Save for sparrow and crow

With south wind for sign post

And further to go



I sang to the quicksilver

Dead in the earth

Who lay with the bear's teeth,

The strawberry red,

And the sweet things that were



You dreamed it, child--

Was all I was told, but the

Far garden called and we

Grew up wild

Grew up wild.

___________

visit One Shot Wednesday #26

Nothing

When your words are sharp and cutting,

it hurts my heart--

i feel like nothing

i fall down a long dark well;

if you ask, i'll only tell

you that "it's nothing"

(i feel like)

nothing.

________

Talkies

Into a silent house with orderly shelves

Came me

With the big gesture

And a book of ghost stories--

Getting into my mother's jewelry and crowing,

"I'm a star!!!"

You couldn't shame it out of me.

Always,

I made necklaces from rain drops--

And where the wooden fence met the back of the garage,

That was my plantation

Where I bossed my puppets about

And no one demanded a sensible word all day.

Chokecherry wine is bitter,

And while I loved the odd scent on Daddy's breath when he picked me up and held me,

Bottles are never becoming for a lady.

My movie goes on and on

And I have survived,

Though Daddy and my first love didn't.

Always, growing up, I insisted

That I had a missing sister-twin

And demanded to know where she was.

Now I have found her.

She is me.

Living is a sketchy business,

And I'm sorry for the ones I have had to leave behind;

But when I lay my dreams out like fancy dresses,

Put them on and call them poems,

"Ta-da!

I'm a star!!!"

And you can't take that away from me.

_______

Photograph: Tracey Power as Mary Pickford. Last line courtesy of George and Ira Gershwin.