American Pandora

 

Pandora admires her stack of new moving boxes from U-Haul.

After the debacle last time,

any problems should be small

like the railroad apartment she's leaving.

Pandora was a gifted kid, winning science projects and writing ribbons

tacked up on a bulletin board,

but like many to whom much is given,

she never expected the burn-out and the drifting.

Buck up, girl! she tells herself, and starts sorting gewgaws and hair bows.

I was set up to fail, she thinks,

loaded up with junk and mottoes

from all those uncles appearing from workbenches with scavenged parts.

She'll pack these boxes and mail them to herself out in Santa Fe

where the Land of Enchantment

waits with its southwestern way

of letting hope grow like junipers around the foothills and her heart.

____________

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List is good through Saturday. Come, on, peek inside!

A Spilling of Ephemera

 

My life spilled out and spread.

The glass lay on its side like a drunk or a sleeper.

"I await my dream lover," it said, and I called the police. 

One cop turned out to be the Right One and they jumped the nightstick the next day.

"I can't even get arrested in this town," I bitch to my spilled life.

It never says anything back.

I try staring it down but all I see is my reflection and every time it's a draw.

Art for art's sake, just like in the movies. Me in the role of me.

I plunge into my spilled life like a mermaid,

wearing it like a scaly tail. I sing to sailors and to other mermaids

such lovely songs that end in ruin. I am a chest bobbing on the surface,

a promise I can never keep to you or to myself, 

a bright reflection in a dazzled eye, 

a quicksilver tease of things rich with remove, 

a luminous dying and deathless ephemera.

___________

for Sunday Muse #216

The Mercy Of Tigers

My loved ones with their fish-hook tongues 
kissed me, blamed me for the blood.
I took to pulpit, text became
curse you
and you
and you the same.

I took to keeping tigers fine
right here in Shady subdivision.
Code Enforcement lost their minds,
saying no.
god no,
it's violation.

Tigers, soft as angel's nest,
muscled, purring Detroit dreams,
lay anvil heads upon my breast
and striped my world flame-and-cream.

In back yard buried the barbed wire ring,
more notices drift against the door, 
saying
no, just no,
these prohibited things
forbidden, verboten, forevermore.

Tigers sweet as caramel nuns,
teeth smooth and strong as hymns at dawn,
across your tongues devotion runs
in me, with me, on and on.
________

for Sunday Muse 107 .

Reincarnated Grandmothers

Reincarnated grandmothers
have had it with knitting--
fuck that shit.
Now it's our turn to not visit you.
Check us out.
Send us money on our birthdays
cos we wanna drink it up and to hell with thank-you's.
Watch us steal your bae,
troll your page,
lie, cuss, catfish.
You want cookies? 
Buy a bakery. 
______

A 55 for my BFF.
 

Cherokee Kiss

Saint Creola,
patroness of crows and Gypsies,
hear my prayer
and bless our Cherokee kiss

in the asters and black jack--
like anything--
like this.
_______

For Play It Again, Toads #20 at Real Toads. I did Mama Zen's. (well no shirt, Shitlock.)

Sounds kind of like a song. I wonder who should sing it? ;-) 

Apple Heart

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

Emily Dickinson

 

I'll never tell you what I really wanted.

I'd rather chamber that thought and give it head, and if there are

hookers in Heaven, why then I'll have a job.

 

Keep mystifying doctors, dear,

with your apple heart--

red on the outside,

bloodless on the inside,

 

a sucker bet I lost but lived to tell.

_____

 

a 55 for Kerry at Real Toads.

 

 

Constance

“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.”
― Terry Pratchett 

Here is how I began:
a core, curled and sleeping
inside a temporary flesh of fruit.

The seed is the thing, after all,
and the rest just a vehicle
to be eaten or wasted.

Nonetheless, some say you and I must not rest too close together on the branch.
There will always be some busybody with a hammer and nails,
rattling on about what's natural.

Well, forget them. We have both come too far to listen to such stuff.
Here are my arms, the same arms as they have always been.
Here is my skin, so much like yours.

I have been told I was one thing, only to know I was another.
I love you, and that  I did not need to be told,
because home never changes; only the map, and the traveler herself.
_______

 "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one" Galatians 3:28

“I don’t understand the hatred and fear of gays and bisexuals and lesbians…
it’s a concept I honestly cannot grasp. To me, it’s not who you love…
a man, a woman, what have you…
it’s the fact that you love. That is all that truly matters.”
― Al Pacino 

for Real Toads "Legacies of Nimoy and Pratchett." 

 

Wampus Cat

They said I was sneaking around,
soft-stepping,
silent as a grudge,
listening in on their conversation.

It's their council fire, you know.
They discuss lacrosse,
and similar such like.
They imagine that women burn to know what they yap about.

The shaman set aside his jerky,
and rose up.
My half-grown niece has more magic in her Juju dolls
than ten medicine men working the mystical expression.

Anyway, they think they turned me into a wampus cat
as punishment for my wicked spying.
Rare, the wampus cat
that I already was, already was, already was.

Many's the dawn when I saw white man's angels coming down;
many the feathers in my wampus cat mouth
by the time I was finished fooling with them
and the sun rose high.

Lacrosse player,
where is your wife?
Soft stepping with the wampus cat
to a place where fallen pine needles are welcoming and warm.

They said I was sneaking around;
I was.
They said the shaman turned me into a wampus cat;
too late for that.

Good thing, I think,
when men get solemn and injured like they do,
that a wampus cat, like any cat,
cannot smile and is sly enough to keep her eyes downcast.

_______

for Margaret's challenge at Real Toads! 

 

the lock

There is a small lock inside me,
kept close between my ever-folded
ever-hidden
falcon wings,

and it keeps beating,
keeps keeping me here,
bless it.
Bless its tireless devotion to this life I've made

from scraps and blood, sugar and hope.
I don't think I'll see the summer again,
but I remember her as she was when I was young--
long, careless, cicada-buzzed and deep.

What have I done, with all the cloud-changed hours?
Have I loved you?
I have.
Have I told you?
Yes, constantly and every chance I got.

I want to finish this book, and then one more.
I want to enjoy a few more meals.
I want to see these mighty snows made meek and melted.
I will miss my dog, but he will rejoin me in time.

The falcon inside me is worrying the ties
that keep the lock in place.
I can feel her working, and the sky, waiting.
It will be all right.

If I am a little bit melancholy, it is because I am surprised,
astonished, really,
to feel the catch loosening
and I wonder what it will be like, when the door swings out,

and I leave this place for home.
______

 

 

Conquistadors

Across my back yard, trampling my hybrids and leaving divots in the lawn,
come Conquistadors.

They are a tired, yet arrogant, bunch.

They are unshaven and appear to have run out of soap and polish.
They have been wandering for a long time,
and they frankly stink.

My neighbors in all directions declared them gods,
and were dealt with at the point of a lance.
A few coughed themselves to death deep in the trees,
and their pets have gone feral.

I am the last to spit at mention of their name,
and now they have come for me;
I was waiting. 
My skin is rich with dark tattoos no Spanish lady would ever allow,
but do you see them here?
Watch, and I will summon them.

The Conquistadors laugh at the locals,
and have exterminated us for profit and simply because they could.
They have lice and diseases unnamed.

As they approach my door, I lift my hair.
I kiss the Catholic cross on its leather string,
and slip it over my head.
It rests between my breasts, where they can't miss it.

Do you suppose that men who no longer fear God
might still fear the trappings of God,
the ones they learned at their mother's knee back in Granada or Seville?

I conjure these women, sisters and sweethearts too,
each of them devout and pure, at least around family.
"Watch where you're walking!" I call.
The Conquistadors look up.
"Have respect!" 

I am dressed all in black, 
like the funeral of all they once had faith in.
I tell them it is Sunday--
they have been in the wilderness or at sea for so long, they have no idea.
I have tied a rope to one of my mules,
and he chooses this moment to take a few steps, ringing the bells.

The tarnished helmets come off,
and the Conquistadors make the sign of the cross,
stiffly, as if their fingers had forgotten the motions.
They may rape me tomorrow.
They may slit my throat and burn my house,
but for today
I have them in the palm of my hand.

I silently pray to my pagan American goddess
to inspire me with a way to close my fingers and snuff these Grandee bastards
while they mill in my yard
like rams who have, for a moment, forgotten their quarrels and horns.
_______
 

blood egg

It only hurts at first.
Look--
the stars still wheel,
and you are still here, miles beneath them, like before.

To be consumed, whether by rapture or dumb beasts,
is the opening of the blood egg.
Thank the tooth or the jagged shell edge
that teaches you this sudden language of ascent.
_______

The Storm Chaser

The storm chaser
found the narrow way
down a straight road
into the wind's dark blue heart.

There, she found
Athena with her bolts,
wearing a silver-black snake around her arm,
falcon feathers in her hair,
and not much else.

When the storm chaser kissed Athena--
rippling strikes across the sky.
When the storm chaser loved Athena--
hail from the heavens, honey on her thigh.

When the storm chaser got home,
there was no sign of the damage to her car.
She had swapped out the mirrors
and bumped out the dents
herself, at a truck stop in Stephens County.

"Where did you go?"
"Shopping," she said,
with a forked tongue as sure and sweet as tupelo. 
_________

_________