Posts for June 27, 2021 (page 3)

& in the silence,
my heart still manages to beat

through the pressure
& pain & sadness

& longing

tonight, i paint myself
in the loneliest shade of blue

The party’s drawing
to a close
3 more days then what?              
Who knows?

So many of my peers
in 2020 disappeared,
but this happening,
this writer’s month-long event
brings us together
in the same safe space 
where poems became purpose,
the story of how we feel,
the way we see,
who we were
and who we want to be.

I am so proud and privileged
to belong to this talented
community.
Thank you,
Katerina for starting.
Thank you,
Chris for continuing.
Thank you, Bronson,
for all the tech support
even if I don’t understand it.
Thank you to the village
for being my famiily.

Entire evenings are spent
Excavating a jagged rock from my sandal
That I planted there when I was sleepwalking
And yet
There’s so much casual beauty
Floating in and out of the tunnel
In which I take in the world
Even as the thought passes through
Sure to leave as quick as it came
A husky smiles, tongue flapping
Through the cracked window of a car
That speeds by, and over
The bloody shard that I chucked into the road
Just moments before

wicked heat
dissipates  unpack long
sleeve tees  pants and jackets

plants breathe in deep with
me  cool moist mesa
air  we sigh out warmth
that boiled inside

creativity purpose and action
return with plans and pens and
paint  desert hope flows

Sharp jabs and spiteful glares…
family dinners are not always
tv ready:
sipping your tea the wrong way,
chewing with a gaping hole
where your mouth
belongs, and spewing
in complete silence.
An invader at the table—
new face to all
but one—shouts one sly,
unwarranted
comment and she’s
united the North
and South, earning
6 sets of daggers
pointing straight
into her soul.

I’m wearing a black sheath dress and stiletto heels,
a soft-sided briefcase slung over one shoulder,
black leather purse hanging from the other.

Tucked under one strap is a gray shawl and
a looped black braided cord that isn’t mine.

I pass two men on the corner at Mill and hear
She’s cute!                       I   do    not    feel    “cute.”

At the crowded bus stop I stand under the clock
in front of the jeweler’s and wait and wait and

the Euclid bus doesn’t come. Father doesn’t come.
Walking farther along the now-deserted street,

the buildings derelict and boarded, the pavement
rough, I adjust and re-adjust the bags, tread

carefully to avoid cracks, take care not to lose the shawl
and braided cord. A bus stops, I get on, look around

for Father, take a seat halfway back across the aisle
from a brown-suited man holding two yapping

dachshund puppies. He says we’re on the cemetery
route so I get off, but now I’m carrying a stray

calico. Retracing my steps, tired, feet hurting,
the kitten a-wiggle, I trudge toward the Phoenix.

Maybe Father waits for me there, or I’ll ask
a bellhop to call a cab to take me                     where?

The hotel is just ahead, but the blocks
get longer and longer, the sky darkens, Main Street
narrows, the buildings seem to close in  … 

Chloe, my calico, wanting breakfast, rubs against my face.

I suppose the promise of love still remains for some
                   wrapped within
                   the petals of a single perfect rose
                   or luxuriating behind
                   the tinted glass of the limousine Dorothy Parker lusted for

but give me again
                   a baggie of crinoids–
                   like fossilized Cheerios–
                   you collected from creek beds
                   that match those you strung on your necklace as a symbol of home

“  

What ligatures lost among mangled moorings?
This smoldering molt of a motionless poet
too loathe to be bothered by beautiful beckons
in lieu of the grumbling auger glanced
‘long slavering trances, trenches, and salt flats.  

Our Abecedarian’s abacus snapped across crooked knees,
damp haze of a cherry-eyed dream uncrumpling,
garbled and gnawed along nervous creases
smeared and jeered by a gibbet uncoiled
from Eiseley’s wasp-swoln oak endeared with
graven crests shone pale as yet pin-pricked planets
poised and planted about an indelible bark  

(shrill wincing whistles some sloppily wine-sapped sister
(or so among daughters’ dearest darlings dubbed)
should sharply skip across crackling streets,
round sullen soles and stridently summoned scowls
of sluggishly smoothing shards she’d
snapped from a broken bequest,
this rose-strewn wreath
of a hand-painted plate
percussed, greige edges rawed, pale crazing crusts
that meticulous mothers might patiently piece
and congeal with the dribbling juice of fastidious fingers
flayed for the sake of a keepsake),  

gnarly, darkened, glorious, porcelain bark
that quilt-kempt prongs of abrasive bucks
must break and braid in impervious patterns,
fey and laic cryptids cut amid shifting skin,
run rampant, dormant, salient, sejant,
reared upon pealing plates like thunderous thumb prints
seared against glaring glims,
like cataracts casually crafted coyly as woodgrain, hardly
as pulses prick—  

smudged irises dyed a familiar umber,
inky umbrages strangling slowly snaking stocks
and borderless branches, breakneck distaff
darned in derisively drooping shades
that a grandmother’d bade among silvery bangs
and the bruise-bound blood of an unctuous compact
oozed from shrewdly buckling fingers
(bacon’s bubbling molt’d annealed once more),
left ever thus twisting a tress preserved
with a tress unnerved
to wriggle and gasp
as a finger trap
triggered—  

What shadily earth-shorn arches, slender soles
reflecting a radius wound amid azure
and brambling veins engorged
by blended blood, averring that
red and blue, once blended,
bleed to red and blue  

(this obsessively passing buck,
the empurpled contusions of
flesh confused amid ravishing
fusion, surnames struck from
tumbling tongues that flip and
fillip in frothing dirges
catty, catadromous, disaffected,
cramped, cathected, disabused,
eclectic, bored, unbunged, then emptied,
pulseless husk of a sun-smothered beetroot)— 

Say
                                           “Vinegaroon of an Onion Kid” beat                                    
                                            about jangling chains of congested serifs,                                                                                              embossing a balsa hilt of the yellow sword                                                                                          he’d stripped from the hip of a Chippendale;  

                                            wan tumi wove of pilfered bone
                                            Cistercians’ rebellious children take
                                            to raking the nacreous sinew slick
                                            from thatch-frail stalks of the story-staved wolfsbane.  

Recall the Hyrcanian cat
once crouched and rasped
beneath bilious Hamlet’s tongue
that plunged from a stillborn mere of steel
(some sickly silvered limb
of dismembered waters
dammed with a monogrammed hanky),
licked at the thickened, sepulchral salve
of a broken crown,
of a blunted crest,
of the rubbery crust
of a honeydew plundered,
            bloated with frailly paling pips,
            the precocious hoards that knock kneed kings and princes
            pit upon sweat-shorn sheets of encircling grout
            and the tallow-softened spouts
            some slaves installed, gruff hordes
of puckering eunuchs prune and hourly polish,
            hung around harrowing harems,
            draped against creeping napes of the niggling balustrades
            tress-lithe iron femurs stent,
            ‘tween dusted shins of the muttering servants
            sealed with a sallowing pigment rank,
            coarse ink of a cuttlefish,
            gilt as careening eves
of clumsing, cloyed, wan-ocherous pollen,
            sneezing seas but ragweed jerks around
            jaggedly rankling breezes,
            boorish, boring, bluntly belaboring breaths—  

See the rough rubbings of rusted chassis;
mold among dust but threadbare breathing teases
easily, sloughed from a crusted mold
no neurotically nauseous godling dares
to retire to shadowy attics’ shunts;
this tiger’s kingly scowl that snakes
among Mandarins’ surnames, prowling proudly,
pinned upon pitiless plights of alighting spirits,
tales of a forebear’s glories fanned
or clipped in a prickling, rimed, and cloud-dinged clasp,
splayed feelers raised with rippling ages,
reared on a lurid, illustrious aegis,
propped upon itchily quivering palms,
ensnared in a chafing and sun-stained mantle
flesh-firm, lush, and empurpling maypole
wound and bound in strips of repurposed
naugahyde cribbed from a blacklisted fire sale.  

Say
                                    “Vinegaroon of  beet kid” bleared;
                                    what gar-toothed rasp of a raddling hermit,
                                    twirled ‘twixt noxious curds and a grandmother’s
                                    kisses sown among softening scowls;
                                   
                                    what files flake, what rasps remiss
                                    when twirled ‘twixt murmurous stars
                                    and an arching spine, glib memories
                                    etherized, supine,
                                                                        set to a shaky scalpel’s tang
                                    that chatters in deafening dirges,
                                    dithering shimmies, waltzes, trots,
                                    and the muttered merengue

                                    poised upon parents’ clogs—”

First swim of the summer. I slide
into the pool. The cold bites at first,
then soothes. I lean back against the bed
of water, let my toes rise, break the surface.
Cradled, my view is of the sky. 

Cardinal and blue jay pass above me.
Above them, trees lean in, whisper secrets.
Higher still, hawk circles, disappears. 

With small, slow hand motions, I propel
myself across the deep. Shush of water
in my ears muffles nearby conversations.
Water changes, warmer on the surface,
cooler just a few inches beneath. 

I search for the worries, problems I packed
with towel and sunscreen. They are gone,
sunk to the depths, or floated into the sky. 

If I could I’d take the chance to escape this car

Fold and contort my body like a love letter

Slip my soft bones and slick skin right out

The cracked window as it screams and cries

If I could slip out of this parked car I would.

And I can. So I did. A Micheal’s parking lot

Really feels like an open valley at 3am.

Asphalt slaps bare feet real good if they’re flat.