Ravish me, Ralph.
Rip a sliver of me
from this heavy flesh
and preserve it
in silver gelatin.
Hold it up to strangers.
Make them feel how I feel
standing beneath
the lights and white walls,
staring at your blurred
masked children,
catching my own
faint reflection
in the glass.
Scream at them.
Make them invent colors.
Make them see themselves
in this false face.
Autumn’s last fallen leaves
Crack and crubmle
Under the shuffle of steps
Echoing like the spitting
Of late spring’s
Last dirt-dingy ice braking apart
Making a way for summer’s flowers——-
Eighty six–her life is cracking
Breaking and crumbling around the edges
Reading her for the splitting into her rest–
Making a way for memories of her
amoung the summer flowers.
In a mirror held for me recently
by those who have loved me
long and well
I saw myself desiring
a tussle
a conflict
some righteous indignation-
not the self-image I had
been crafting.
I have patience in
my classroom
I was the peacemaker of
my family but
as I watch this docuseries,
church-sanctioned homeschooling as
a means to raise perfect
victims of
abuse my
hands
are itching
to be
thrown.
Cling to the fur on my back, babies.
I will trod you to safety and
hiss through my
ugliest, most pointy snout at
all who give the faintest
whiff of danger.
Survival leaves no time
to suffer fools.
There’s no better time like the present
to tell you how much I miss you
you’ve been gone far to long
but only a few hours
Your scent still lingeres in the air
and the warmth from our last embrace still engulfs me
I hear you still but faintly
I don’t know how much longer I can wait
Memories of the laughter we shared
and the tears we cried moments ago
reminds me that life is fleeting
and we are not immune to the inevitable
The soft crevices in your face
outlines the years of work and sacrifice
giving of yourself only to not have enough
I wish I had offered more
I can’t excuse my behavior
I was not taught for this moment
I’ve observed and said it would never be me
because this day was not coming
I ask, knowing the answer
I persist understanding the cost
I am aware that my longing and my memory
will not fit like gloves to a hand
I miss you and there is no better time like the present
to tell you I want you back
even though you live in me forever
I struggle to see the meaning
There is no better time like the present
could there have been, will there ever be
I miss you
for I had you just moments ago
Makia A. 6-3-23
At sunset, they ride
Hot bikes
Fast women
And vice versa
Pyro and pentagrams
Cheating death
Making enemies
Destined for decadence
Existed early on: a fresco in King Minos’ palace on the island of Crete, dated 2100 BC, on walls inside Egyptian pyramids, 1500 BC. Painted by da Vinci, Dürer, Van Gogh, Monet, O’Keeffe. They grow wild in almost every US state, tall and dwarf, leaves like swords, six-petaled flowers, 3 inner (upright), 3 outer (hanging), bloom white, yellow, red, blue, purple to near black, bi- and tri-colored. Adorned with dramatic veins, dots; crested, bearded (a patch of fussy hairs—a landing strip—to guide pollinators to nectar. Said to be named after Iris, Greek goddess of rainbows, messenger of the gods, arcing earth to heaven.
On a weekend getaway, a friend and I happened on an iris farm in full bloom where they dug up the entire plant—rooted rhizomes, clinging soil and all. We came away with bags that filled my trunk and the back floor wells. What rapture—their heady scent (powdery, earthy, spicy) nuzzled us as we drove through Kentucky, windows down when their fragrance overwhelmed my compact car. What care we lavished on them. What wild, lush dreams sprung from the musk of them laid out in the hotel bathtub while we slept.
right now there is nothing I want more than
a pint jar of honeysuckle jelly
that tastes like the air of Kentucky May
when sunshine heats the pale-yellow petals
beneath a cloudless blue sky
a breeze blithe on my newly bare skin
the undergrowth of green vines vivid against shadow
right now there is nothing I want more than honeysuckle jelly
and you
alive at the kitchen table in our house in the woods
spooning jelly on the scratch biscuit in your hand
winking a blue eye at me
sun reflecting off the glass jar of palest yellow
shadows bound to the vines on the edge of the woods around our house
Nothing burns hotter
than a flame thrower
sitting still blowing hot air
out their scorched throat.
Hold your foul verbiage
before you set me on fire
with your combustible lies
behind smoke filled truth.
Let me leave you
before I explode
and my shrapnel weakens
your perceived loss of power.
MAVIS (assays the new Maginot line,
filliping ribs and semantical foibles,
awling a few more awkward ulcers,
verily, into a tacit tawse,
a coldly coddling bodice smothering
shunted reeds and wrens’ beaks bent to
double Das Jahr und Die Mainacht over,
bunged in a body she’s bawdily rented—):
who spat in the humours of Newton’s bow
these wistful epistles
sarcastic, crass, and nasty,
blackstrap molasses muddled
with roof tar stamped
to a host of exuberant
pasties;
what had her signet read there rapt about
blistering nipples expressing such grisly mirth—
not, Out damned spot!
nor uxorious psalms
that the sisters of mercy should sternly strum
on which blood-flecked rib of Jesus,
you must choose,
the dog-eared huckster
muddling, three of spades and three of spades,
the three,
in the small of his courtesan’s back,
in a perilous rage of Monte;
drumming young Mendelssohn-Hensel’s März,
she rasps a flattened Die Junge Nonne like
steam escaping the rustling gut
of a billowing whale careened across cross-armed rocks
some proudly simpering star,
contented to cast its light like pestling rebar,
sucked so sickly svelte as a bull’s cock,
braids of a prattling cattleman’s bola
plumbing a hoarsened throat and
no—
life isn’t a ruthless round of penny-stenched
mumblety-peg or drunken stud.
What whimsied woman’s worth was measured in
wit and wrought to the oenomel pitch of an
armpit cocked in the face of adversity;
what some ill-gotten god had drummed
from a rib
is the thundering score of apocalypse,
scores of potvaliant valkyries scarring the sun
to hurl crackling stars up Woden’s bung
and to whip the Acropolis raw—
and sleave from the feathering bones of Athene
(some charlatan swore were strictly Zeus’ dandruff)
war paint, arsenic, head lice, mince,
embittering larks of some carnival barker
who’s hawking her bearded sister—?! No,
and know that no means no, yes—?
The new Maginot line’s tickling ribs of a corset,
shouldering slanted soles, decrying
that sapid space ‘twixt twisted knees
to read as a redolent hen’s vent;
Holes!
from which once Jesus drew
that first informative breath, emollient
holes! Napoleon crept and slept in,
plotting his bawdy revenge in St. Helena;
holes! from which the autochthons sprung
like coils perturbed from a mattress bludgeoned;
and even that monstrous Knox emerged
from witches disturbed with what they’d darned in
holes, that loom amidst groping gases
stars these ravenous bastards crowned
with a coxcomb, dubbing some motherly sun
a more fatherly force,
a more penetrative power—
a louring cock
grim grandmothers thrust from their granddaughter’s comely bowers,
evermore struck from the puckering sky, yes, quivering
holes allowing the moon to steep
in an oddly effeminate eye and—
No,
No,
No!
This fucking hole’s far more than a frothing forge
or a fumarole gargling gnashing stone
to the stodgily peacocked crown of a golem,
more than some thatch-raddled mantrap longingly
cocked amongst slavering rocks
and the glistening hen’s teeth
clung at the throat of a cockatrice! Fuck! It’s
more than a cauldron of intimate envy,
more than a portal for dissolute souls to sluice through,
more than a torpid scar some immaculate bishop had
shamed, had staked
as a stye on a god’s eye
grown from the moan of unsettling shadows,
more than a pliant pit or an oubliette shadowing
termagants loosed on the Midlands,
more than mere paddocks for brooding bull’s to cud,
where the roses rise like dying stars,
or a playa of plasticky clay
awaiting its paled and greasily leaden glaze. Pygmalion
gropes at a bellbuoy, picks
among slops and plots of sargasso, and,
plumbing for some scarce substance
evermore shapeless
still,
cries wolf
at the bulb of a floundering angler,
laureate lure contesting a stolen star,
mere lures, he sighs, are the soul
of the female
figure—
Off with his head!
a bevy of glans
like waddling
costards clotting a crock of darkly preponderant ape shit!
(She beheads the steadfast pins from a crumbly corn husk, all the
while Abe Sada peers from the eaves of a nunnery,
oenomel gleam of a bleating sunrise
snow-scuzzed mountains gored,
borne clenched between blackened teeth
and a harem of hot springs ironing
veiling pines.
The cones began to writhe.)
Our lives are
Many stories –
Influenced by,
Tied to, and
Enmeshed in
The story of
Each person we
Encounter.
Creating a
Huge web, like
The fungi that
Spread
Under the earth and
Tie together
All the
Flora and fauna of
The forest.
