Posts for June 6, 2022 (page 10)

Deep in the night

The dogs whimper,
legs whirring,
chasing the rabbits who escape in daylight.

The air conditioner roars,
given voice,
a monster unleashed in darkness.

A car approaches,
tires thumping,
by night exposing day’s hidden treasures.

When I sleep,
I dream,
recovering the past that separates our waking lives.

I haven’t said a thing,
yet I wash my mouth out with soap.
Irish springs cakes
between my gapped teeth.
Everything filth.
I scrub under my nails
until the bar becomes concave.
A clamshell softened to my grit.
I wish I was a pearl;
something small and worthy
and hidden.

Splashing in the pool on a hot summer’s day,
Spending an hour or two this way.
Putting on sunscreen,
Nibbling on something,
See the cloudless blue sky as you play.

she stabs herself 

deep mid-chest
slices heart open

pulls him out one
memory at a time

there
at 
the
bottom

bobbing in blood
encased in scars

she finds herself 

My Feelings About Coloring or Sitting Around Wasting Time  

I force myself to try,
injured and unable to drive
or go outside, I find
pencils, markers, gel pens
and mosaic coloring books
from my child’s childhood.  

Then, I sit at the dining room table
and color.  I feel guilty.
I feel embarrassed.  I feel
disgraced by myself
and my brokenness.
Swimming in sin, I color  

for hours. And I don’t stop
after the first day, I do it again.
I even enter a picture in a coloring
contest. I win a coloring book.
I am hooked until it’s time
to learn how to walk again.

Some…
Die
Pass
Pass on
Pass away
Go home
Go to their eternal rest
Get their angel wings

Some…
Go peacefully surrounded by family
Are found alone
Fight valiantly to the end
Lose their battle
Never give up hope  

Some…
Are remembered fondly
Leave behind to mourn
Are left unclaimed

(For Jennifer Gleason of Sunflower
Sundries Farm & her friend, Sarah
Culbreth of Tater Knob Pottery)

i drink jennifer’s spicy chai from sarah’s
exquisite cup, its glaze tinted with the
morning sky’s muted blues and think of them

they’re nearly the last of the kind
of women whose beings are expressed
   in the manual work found in worn

hands. dedicated for decades to
  levels of craft-woman-ship found
in places off the beaten path

iconoclasts and collaborators
who share a birthday
and who have heard institutional

men be so wrong about who they are
that listening and forgiveness
is beside the point

more than a century of miles between 
them but no distance to their thoughts,
women who know when the other needs

to talk. when they’re together I keep
a respectful distance,  a certain 
reverence obtains, like around peasant 

women who rule the village
or Tibetan nuns who have gone off
to their hilltop

Sun saturates starseed
to the bone, fosters new bone,
new star, star to light
the mornings, star to burn
the land, star to balance worlds
like dinner plates on poles
or stumble and crash into itself,
star to pollinate through
radiance or rupture,
ballad or blood.
Starseed plants itself
in a field of crows and sparrows,
acres from the highway
and its seeds dead
in shaded screaming shells.
Starseed is on fire
with vitamin and napalm.
Starseed could burn forever,
heat everything, grow
into a galactic steed, pull its weight
or buck the earth into gravel,
split its forehead open.

forward march to match
                  sandal shaded
                             ground-

limbed in barefoot care.
grasping milkbound flesh

                         with wind
                      blindfolded-
clothblown handheld air.