she said her name out loud
in front of mamaw’s
mirror
just to see the sounds
four syllables
made
then she did it again
mouth smeared pink
by lipstick found
buried
in the left middle drawer
behind old letters
both stuck there
by experience’s glue, by
the trappings we each make
playing childhood
games
in reality’s mirror
To curse one’s self to be so sure,
Not to be tossed on the waves of wood
That flow across the floor to the door.
Needle fingers harm without intent;
To suck and inject such malevolence.
Heard the cry from my bed, surrounded by furious candlelight.
Down stairs, where the spiral traps
Those who come bearing ignorance.
I thought briefly that carolers had come,
And that they’d sought to aid me endure my plight.
But my memory began to slip,
I was now caught in a lapse.
The walls began to creak and moan,
To goad me on and ensure my vengeance.
For out of the darkness I should see,
My own staring back at me.
I started at once to take flight,
But caught myself in jest.
If so surely, I had come to kill myself
And do my own family harm.
I surely would be better aided,
By the unswayed enemies I daily spy.
Certainly, this seems quite a dream;
At my feet lay the utmost tools of cruelty.
The eye of a writhing serpent,
Opening its mouth as if to cry for repentance.
As if to be so sure of this revelation,
I strode away through the nearby door. Only to fall, and land with a heavy thud.
Across my bare skin, I felt the smooth body of the snake as it slithered around me.
As it neared my head, I again saw the eye, ever open and utterly terrifying.
As it opened its mouth to strike,
I saw my own face in its eyes.
And woke up, as the fangs sank into my throat.
I found myself in a pool of sweat,
I tried to reassure myself at last.
Then I saw, lit by dim candlelight, in the clock beside my bed my own eyes so full of dread.
Then across the floorboards came a deafening sound, the cry of a voice that I knew at once.
“You’re mad. I should take you to a hospital at once. There, you’ll not be able to hurt yourself anymore.”
The voice of my brother, long ago driven away.
I could have sworn he was out to get me,
Claiming me to be ill.
My lapse over, I came to realize
My own brother was such a snake.
In the darkness that has been heralded,
Who am I to truly know.
To be so sure, as to not fall;
Through cracks in reality where sanity is so removed, the snake ever writhing on the floor.
Every drop of rain
a loud whispering conversation
the sound of silk in friction
cobwebs caught in the wind
I can’t help but wonder
what secrets those whispering
drops are sharing
what arguments
are tangled
between them
They’re in a race
to see who can crash
to the ground first
a slithering irony
sliding between them
Arguing all the way down
as they fall from heaven
the sound of silk
thin whispers
sliding between them
every drop of rain
a whisper between them
It seems
The air is filled by some unspoken
sadness, some feeling that we’re all too scared
to talk about or
to give life to.
There is catharsis in knowing;
the tears I shed tonight are cathartic.
The grief seems to always be one step ahead of me.
We must skim frog eggs from the pool
each day before cannonballs and floaty noodles.
That’s just the way it is living in the forest. The Cope’s gray
love the clear, still water, no matter the chemicals.
The youngest kid, who squealed at me
to skim, is now pouting that I’m killing baby frogs.
I explain these aren’t baby frogs. They are only
potential baby frogs, just like an acorn is not an oak tree,
but it has the potential to become an oak tree
if the conditions are right. Just like a ball of fetal cells
is not yet a child, but has the potential to become
a child if conditions are right. And I do the math
billions of women do. The two miscarriages had the potential
to become children who would now be 22 and 5, books ends
to the two that became. I had a Tuesday appointment to terminate
the first pregnancy but went to the hospital instead of The Who concert
the Saturday before in spontaneous abortion, my body freeing me
of having to make the decision. Responsibility traded
for a torturous unanaesthetized D&C in the ER
while med students stared up inside me.
I began to miscarry the other while hoeing a spring garden,
edging around plants that would feed the family come autumn.
My body kept the two that were planned,
and now I scoop and dash these frog eggs onto the grass
so those two children can pretend to be mermaids
and border control agents in the glittering turquoise water.
I’ve named the two only-ever-potential-children clumps of cells.
I’ve decided they were boys: Corbin Thomas and Elias Richard.
I wonder where their souls ended up choosing to be born.
I’m ok with their redistribution, my acorns who never were
oak trees in this forest, my pregnancies that were never children
in my family, my not-quites whose absence has affected everything.
The rain patters on the tin roof
My cars headlights brighten our faces
A fresh cigarette and salty tears
I fall in love with souls
The things we go through,
Make us who we are,
But that’s not all we are.
Everyone’s soul is unique
And your soul keeps me awake.
They say if you love someone,
Let them go.
I say if you love someone,
Let them know.
No one knows when our bodies
Will be gone and our souls will float.
So fight for your souls, never give up on your people
You’ll know if they’re worth it.
And dammit if you end up hurt,
Your soul just has another great story To tell.
June, warm, with thunderstorms—grass season.
Zero-turn mowers scuttle about the monoculture lawns
And along fencerows, like weird crustaceans,
Backward, forward, pivoting, unpredictable,
Their operators clutching the upright claws.
I think of them as crab-turn mowers,
Though unlike crabs, they can’t go sideways.
In the fields, spiked hay rakes turn the tall grass
Into windrows, not destined for the compact bales
That the shirtless boys of my youth
Once lifted effortlessly onto wagons,
Farm boys unaware of their own strength,
Or even their transitory beauty.
Today’s windrows will become round bales,
That weigh a ton and can crush a car
(I’ve seen it happen)
And must be lifted by machines.
A handsome word, “windrow,”
Nearly forgotten now, in steady decline
Since its peak in the agrarian 1950s,
After its first recorded use in 1523,
To describe cut grass exposed to wind
For drying before being forked and ricked,
As there were no balers then.
The OED offers no etymology for “windrow,”
Just a reference to “wind + row,”
“Wind” from the Old English “windan,”
Going back through Norse “vinda” to “wander,”
And “row” tracing its lineage
To an older source,
A Sanskrit term for “stroke,” or “line.”
So, each “windrow” is a “wander line,”
Lying in a pale curve though the shorn fields.
This honest word that limns the scene
Has the feel of Norse or Saxon kennings:
Whale-road, word-hoard, earth-stepper, sea-weary,
Wood-bane, blood-ember, mist hills,
All so much more eloquent
Than the ones we use today:
Arm candy, bean counter, pencil pusher, hot potato,
Slights, in a time that has almost abandoned windrows,
I think of how these peevish modern concepts
Would have confused the marauding Vikings,
Or been perceived as great insults, if understood,
By warriors with neither pencils nor potatoes nor candy.
Perhaps enough to work a pause
In the violent sack of Lindisfarne in 793 AD,
Had the distraught monks been divinely inspired
To shout them out, uncomprehendingly,
Before the mounting bale-fires consumed
Their glorious, hand-lettered, parchment books.
Or what might the original utterer of “windrow” thought,
Standing in a hayfield in Sussex, or maybe Devon,
Admiring a hay crop brought in before ruinous rain,
Had someone responded with “motor mouth,”
“Tree hugger,” “tramp stamp” or “bookworm.”
But that was 1523, when Henry VIII was in his 30s,
Still trim and writing poetry, still married to his first wife, Catherine,
Though that year he warned Henry Percy
To cool things off with Ann Boleyn.
And this is the sinuous path
By which the word “windrow” took me this morning,
In a poem that was supposed to be about
The wholesome pleasures of the month of June.
How is it that I even know “windrow?”
Books, surely. Has to be.
This was not the sort of language
My practical haymaking grandfathers used,
Nor a word favored by the tanned boys
In the long ago fields of my youth,
Fields now as nearly forgotten as “windrows,”
Where the lean boys laughed with hay in their sunlit hair,
As they tossed the first golden bales of June
Onto the waiting haywagons.
Steam lines over a bread loaf?
The “Cruelty Free” rabbit?
A lowercase “V”?
An uppercase “F”?
Apron strings?
Backwards baseball cap?
Nose ring?
Diamond tattoo?
A ginger kitten?
No.
When I hear your name
my first vision
are those lips
you drew
with front teeth
slight gap.
You made me a zine
I look at two or three times a week.
This is when I realized I love you
I said.
Eyes closed, I see
your lips
quivering
our first night
on that awful couch.
That was when
I knew.
Night, desert driving.
Let’s put the top down!
But it’s 103 degrees
even now in the dark.
Stop over for the night.
The sun only catnaps, so
we doze with her, then wake
to chase those foothills up ahead.
A worn old road winds
and climbs.
With the pressure change,
a change in mood,
a satisfying solitude
there together.
Soon, the shouts of
rushing falls,
water calling out to dirt.
And the smell,
rich evergreen perfume,
A promise from the earth—
I was always meant to
have you here.
My hair whips in the wind.
You flash a sun-glassed smile,
and we climb.
Soon we will be among the giants.
Wise old women with rough skins
and soft hearts. I feel the secrets
they grip in their roots.
I am a human woman
on this spinning sphere,
Put in my proper place here,
Dwarfed by history.
Time here exists only
as height
and circumference.
I’m made small again in
space and time,
Humbled anew in my own mind,
Brought back to a place
of stillness, wonder.
Something of the spirit
hums here.
You tell me I’m the one humming.
Can you put a knee on a note’s neck
Put a note on a knee’s neck
A reminder
To quarantine the tone
Repetition not homogenization
Can you pour the notes in our eyes
Shoot rubber livers
Hold back your notes
Put a badge on your nightmare
Put a neck on the note’s knee
Before the music skitters to nowhere
