Pack

I was there, at your childhood Christmas,
crouched behind the tree, my striped backside against the wall.
You missed one gift because I had it in my mouth--
we have always shared everything.

I was there, the first time you made love,
denting the corner of the bed with my weight,
the breath from my nostrils sliding your hair across your eyes.
I was there in the morning,
and there a week later, pacing and turning circles as you cried.

I was there, with a chicken in my mouth
in the sacristy as you said your vows.
I was there at the end of the table with the cousins
that night, yawning wide while you danced.
I was curled silently in the back seat when you drove away.

I have been there, at your job,
at reunions and funerals and vacations and hospitals.
We have always shared everything.
I am there because my chest breathes air, 
my heart moves blood-- 
I want my life just as much as you want yours.

When the man comes, with his gun or his scythe,
I will be there.
He will hang us up by our heels and say, "Well now. Lookit you,"
and we will be still forevermore.
Until then, I am with you, with one eye cast down
on the dirt trail in the night,
and the other cast up
on the impossible wheeling stars. 
______

For Fireblossom Friday

 

Nadine, The First Blind Baseball Player

Not only is she the first blind baseball player,
rare as a thylacine yawning cavernously on the early-morning dewy lawns of suburbia,

she is also the first woman. 

She is Justice and the curve-hipped Eve of the Major Leagues.
She can pitch it on in there, HERE IT IS, HIT IT.
Athena had her owl; Nadine has Oscar the white pigeon.

How does she do it? you may ask.
She can hear the baseball cutting through the air.
When the batter beats one foul down the third base line, she can smell the chalk dust come wafting with the afternoon breeze.

As Oscar circles encouragingly above her,
she kicks and flings that pea.
She can smell where each batter is,
his desire to mash her deliveries into some distant stand,
his fear of looking bad,
his inability to handle the inside fastball,
his stink in the heat of day, and of battle.

"Strike one!" 
Nadine loves the feel of the baseball in her hand,
its seams,
its potential to raise her above her dime-store life.

"Strike two!"
She can hear Oscar's wingbeats.
She can hear fat fingers digging into tubs of popcorn in the stands.
She can hear opposing fans shouting editorials,
mostly obscene.
"Strike three!"

Nadine listens for the sound of her first baseman's breathing.
They had a short affair.
His posture when flipping her the ball as she covered the base
reminded everyone of a suitor kneeling, the ball like a ring in his hand.
She had spent hours touching his face.
With his head full of love sonnets, he had slumped and been sent down,
and though he is back, things aren't the same between them.

With her baseball money, Nadine has gotten herself a little house,
with window boxes and a ledge for Oscar.
She can't see the flowers but can feel their delicacy, smell their fragrance,
so unlike a cleat or a mitt.
She is happy there.

In her famous poster, sold at most sporting goods stores,
Nadine wears designer shades and road grays,
killer lipstick and bookoo confidence.
Little girls idolize her.
HERE IT IS, HIT IT. But no one can.
______

for grapeling's Get Listed challenge. I used "house", "face", and "suburb" (suburbia).


 

Walk

I wanted to walk with you, but
I can walk alone.
You ever walk alone?
Nah, dint think so.

For a long time, every time I looked at you,
I saw
water for the thirsty,
and I was always parched.

Dint matter
if you got skinny, got fat.
Dint matter
what you said, it made my ears cock like I was back in the pack.

Guess you didn't want a woman who thought you were all that.
Guess you didn't want a woman who wanted you
like that.
Guess you didn't want a woman,
and I'm a woman--
one who would have told you all the redfire in her heart,
and never have taken it back.

I wanted to walk with you, but
I can walk alone.
You ever walk alone?
Didn't think so.
________

for Susie's Taking it To The Streets challenge at Real Toads. I hope this fits the bill.  

Madness

Beautiful One,
committing rabid bloody murder
out on the wind-howled dust flats
of this dismal place, come back.

I have repaired the roof of the Environment,
and gotten some of the circuits to work again.
The hours here are intolerably empty without you,
like space, indifferent and suffocating.

At the Program, when we still had futures
fragile as the ecosystems on rocks that circle dying stars,
you were the only Scottish-Asian woman there,
or maybe anywhere.

I should have known then
that I had no chance of discovering anything distant,
when the only launch I cared about
was of my fingers through the black tracklessness of your hair.

Each heart is a rider contained
within a human ship of beauty and bone.
How fragile, how vulnerable we are
to a touch we have longed to know without knowing it.

How defenseless we are when the right face appears, 
making us feel everything,
or the virus which can disguise itself and enter
without being felt at all.

Doubt, fear, terror, carnage--
these are the commanders we answer to now.
Madness sprung from alien chemistry--
destroying us golden gods of science as if we were cardboard.

Cruelest of all, each infected madman here believes themselves sane;
it is the others who have clearly become maniacs.
Honey, if you have disemboweled Anderson from C Deck,
you had to do it. It was self-defense.

At the Program, our lives and our passion had possibilities,
lined up, sparkling and precious, like gem stones in a row on proud display.
My collection was always only
your warm skin, your wicked smile, and the seeking of them both, eternally.

I hate to think that we have shared our last moment
of strictly illegal carnal sweetness.
What I mean is, if I can never kiss you again,
then freezing under a too-distant sun is no different to me than living on.

Eckhart, from supply, looked so crestfallen when he saw what I had to do,
yesterday when we met in Pod B.  
I didn't know that it would be so gory, so awful,
or that he would just stand there, waiting for the blow, his mind already gone.

The rest of the crew is either dead or reduced to
quasi-human, semi-ruined caricatures, carrying flamethrowers and bibles,
ever-present and ever set on the complete destruction
of all that is still good, and gentle, and ennobling.

Listen to me ramble, I sound mad myself, don't I sweetheart?
I'm not though. We are the last two, the Anna and Eve of the end of the world,
and I cannot bear it here without you.
Come back. I'll leave the airlock unsecured,

to let you in, and on the monitor I will see your face,
like a picture of home, or of our days at the Program,
when madness was a delicious thing, the high we wanted again and again,
and if there were consequences, well My Heart, what a way to go.
______

For Get Listed with Kenia! I used the entire list, and kept the sci-fi theme of her book from which the list was taken.

Image from the movie Another Earth.

poem girl

packed deep in the roots of my teeth,
i keep everything i long to say, but don't.
i am as pleasant and sweet as a drink of anti-freeze--
kiss me, i hold thirty-two volcanoes. 

it turned cold, but you had your scarf,
your soft gloves,
your navy pea coat;
what did you need me for?
nothing.

longing cracks my bones open
as if they had been dropped from height by birds.
impossibility is a handy rock--
bombs away, 
the fall,
the split,
the blood-heart in the white shell.
i am a love letter written in angel spit,
misdelivered into hell.

i thought of you last night
and moaned.
there is no other mercy like your hair, your voice, your body;
i am krakatoa
i am a siberian fireball--
my ribs lay flattened for miles,
they heard my stupid whimpering on the streets of paris,
and the skies over new york stayed dusky and dark at noon.

i'm just a girl,
in love with you.
you have a husband you keep close like a voodoo doll--
you hang your heart on him like a blue star.
here is my smile,
empty and harmless.
here are my words, crimson-black on the page,
and when they hit the sea, the sea boils
and every beautiful creature
every mermaid
every siren
every humble shell
is turned to ashes with the expression of my useless flow of sorrow.
_______

image from weheartit.com