Paint Horse

I am the paint horse--
I have high-stepped through a thousand snakes,
mouths open like poisoned prairie flowers;

I have left their heads beneath my hooves,
a row of flat, dull silver dollars
staring at the endless open sky without seeing it.

You have called me,
whether you knew it or not.
You, beneath your buffalo blanket like the moon behind a cloud,
you have drawn me here.

With a circle around my eye,
and a hand print on my flank,
I feel the bones of all who came before us--
yours,
and mine--
beneath this dirt, these roots, this earth in all directions.

I am calling you,
you, the beautiful one I love.
You have pushed the bone shard through the flesh of your slender arm,
and not flinched.
Surely, every ghost will honor this.

I am the paint horse,
waiting;
you are the one I love.
We will not need reins, a saddle,
or anything but our bodies
together like cloud and storm,
across the plains.
________

for Hannaballistic's Transforming Friday challenge at Real Toads. She commands that we write about the prairie and its creatures.

No Tail, No Soul

It didn't have to go the way it did.
I could have turned away, like a coin rolling of a table's edge.
I could have deleted all that happy-faced smarmy shit from my inbox
instead of answering.

I could have been a real bitch and told you to just suck it.
I didn't, but I should have.

And you?
You could have had the grace to get hit by one of those blood-colored buses
in the hectic streets of London.
Your heart could have come bubbling, black,
through your dry lips like a drain backing up.

Wipe your chin, you Manx troll.
You could have left the big island
(may it sink. may the lions on the Thames dip and drink)
and gone back to yours.
(may it sink, too. and may there never be another.)

Airlines could have conveniently gone out of business.
My passport could have been denied.
I could have simply decided to stay home and watch the snow fall.

I went though, like a country fool.
I went, and it was like swallowing a live viper, meeting you.
I crawled home by my fingernails,
and couldn't eat for a month.
My spirit lay still inside me on a dark border I never wish to see again,
but, in time, it wobbled to its feet.

Now it is strong again,
but gets snappy if it is touched.
Love me if you want to, girls, but stay the fuck across the room while you're doing it.

It didn't have to go the way it went,
but I answered your letters, and got on that plane,
and it did.
________

for Fireblossom Friday "calamities"

Loving The Ghost

Before loving a ghost,
understand--
it will be a tricky business.

A ghost will not wear the dress you like.
She will ignore
the meal
the Merlot
and the Mozart.

A ghost does not believe in the future that you've planned.
To a ghost,
the future is feathers made of fog
on a bird that flies away before it is born.

A ghost will not wear your ring.
She will not bear your child, or even your touch.
She is an airy
indigo
butterfly
that can hurt you, and will.
_________

for Real Toads word list. I used "indigo" and "butterfly".

Book Review: "Shiver"

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I adored this book. There are wolves in the Boundary Woods behind teenager Grace's house in northern Minnesota. Six years before the events in "Shiver", she was attacked and bitten by these wolves while sitting on the tire swing in her back yard. She was saved by a strange yellow-eyed wolf who she has come to think of as "her" wolf. At night, in winter time, she can pick out his sad beautiful howls from those of the rest of the pack.

These wolves are different from ordinary wolves, though. For one thing, they are strangely absent in the summer. Then there is their eyes...so human. When a boy from Grace's high school is attacked and killed by two wolves, some strange things begin happening. First, the boy simply disappears from the morgue. Then, when some local men go into the woods with rifles to "do something about the wolves", by the time Grace stops them by telling them her friend is out walking in those woods, shots have already been fired. Grace arrives home to find a yellow-eyed young man lying wounded on her back porch. With him, comes a once-in-a-lifetime love, and a battle to hold on to it.

"Shiver" is very romantic, and Stiefvater makes the whole magical story ring true. This novel is intended for a young adult readership, but I think that anyone with an ounce of heart would love it. "Shiver" is the first of a trilogy which includes "Linger" and "Forever". I can't wait to read the next one.



View all my reviews

The Queen Of Picher

The Queen of Picher
loved the wife of a Baptist preacher
and every night she dreamed she kissed her
in a rowboat on the poisoned red waters of hell.

But it wasn't enough to dream it,
so she went down in the old mines to scream it
til her throat was raw as fresh-rolled sin
and she felt as bright as a Baptist bell.

On Saturday nights she ponder and think
of forty-five ways to wring a preacher's neck,
Then Sunday come and she sigh and sink
into an ass-killin' pew, and the sermon last a week.

Rock of ages,
cleft for me--
let me hide
this sweet burnin' desire for thee.

The Queen of Picher couldn't get her
self in hand, and so she kissed her only love
in broad daylight in the middle of town--

But knees and mines can both go weak,
and by the second kiss, the whole damn street
went down, baby, they fell through thin air straight down.

The Queen of Picher and the Baptist minister's
wife now lie entwined at the bottom of the shaft--
in the shadow of the chat heaps...
and that was that.

________

top photo by my friend Daryl Edelstein, featured today at Real Toads!

bottom photo is of an abandoned church in Picher. To learn about the modern day ghost town of Picher, Oklahoma, click HERE.

optional musical accompaniment available HERE. (opens in new window) 

Xmas Wish

They came a long way
to bring that kid swag.
They pretended not to notice
the livestock
and the funky digs.

Natch, it did finally shake down
to wood, nails, and vinegar,
but still, he blew it off
cos they didn't know what they'd done.

Me neither.
Can't you forgive me?
_______

for Words Count with Mama Zen at Real Toads.

Wilhelmina The Performing Bear

Wilhelmina the performing bear
savagely mauls the little bicycle she is trained to ride.
It wasn't the bars
nor the gawking yokels that made her snap--
it was the memory of the scent of pine needles,
and of two round black faces following trustfully behind her.

Where are they now?
Either one?
And so the bicycle pays.

But, unexpectedly,
it pleads for its life,
saying, "I am only a conveyance,
a tool;
and though I am a tool of the same captors who misuse us both,
though I was born at their hands and at their whim,
I am not them."

Wilhelmina drops the talking bike from her jaws and blinks.
"What are you, then?"

"I am a bicycle. Nothing more."

That night, Wilhelmina dreams she is back in the pine forest.
She raises her great nose to the air and there it is--
humans.
She turns like a locomotive in a roundhouse to warn her cubs,
but her cubs are bicycles,
and they rise, riderless, into the trees.

In the morning,
the keeper comes.
He was once a fairly successful wildlife photographer,
whose shots of snow leopards once graced the face and bones
of a famous national magazine.
However,
drinking and sloth have brought him here,
to Wilhelmina's cage.

"You've done for your bike, have you, you canny bitch?"
He bends to pick it up by its handlebars,
and that is when he becomes the conveyance,
ridden by 400 pounds of maternal fury.

"Thank you," says the bicycle, touched and grateful.
Wilhelmina remembers, now, what it is to kill,
and she is filled with strong and conflicting memories,
drives,
and emotions
which she cannot properly articulate.

After all,
she is only Wilhelmina,
only
a performing
bear.
_____

I first wrote about the keeper HERE. So many people wanted him to get his, that I brought him back to be bear chow. For the record, wild animals being made to perform bothers me.