Feed me a slug
A fragment of my day
No doubt the well’s run dry
but he returns to it
day after day expecting
to retrieve an oak bucket
full of clean, quenching water,
not sand and sediment,
three bucks fifty in wishing coins,
certainly not the desiccated
carcass of a bullfrog.
It would be insanity to think
tomorrow will be any different,
but he already knows he’ll be back,
drawn to that miserly well,
sporting a new necklace of hollow bones,
singing a mid-summer’s song.
I’m afraid of being full
I don’t want my body to be satisfied
The implications of that are far too heavy
A woman cannot feel or be enough
Most don’t even know what that means
And so to quell my hunger is wrong
I’m much better at running on empty
Much more comfortable pushing through the pain
To be sated is an impossible standard
One placed far too out of reach to be attainable
And so I sit, starved, waiting for a moment of fullness that will never come
The garage held the cold air.
Not enough to send us inside,
but enough for my breath to turn pale
in the darkness.
You stood across from me,
rolling a joint with slow hands.
Outside, the moon hung low
and stars slipped through the open door.
From the kitchen,
Frank Sinatra drifted,
crooning about strangers in the night,
like he understood something we didn’t.
I remember the paper cracking
faintly between your fingers,
the embers glowing in the dark.
The joint was warm when you passed it,
still holding the shape of your hand.
It tasted earthy, smoke heavy on my tongue,
clinging to the back of my throat.
The smell clung to everything—
your flannel, my hair, the cool air,
the silence between us.
We passed it back and forth
without speaking,
watching the smoke disappear.
There was only a narrow space between us,
and still,
I spent the whole night staring across it.
Moonlight caught your mouth,
eyes half-hidden
between tiredness and smoke.
Part of me believed
the night would never end.
Sinatra would keep singing from the kitchen,
the cold would never deepen,
and we would stay young.
so much to figure out:
the cracked vessel of my heart,
the mind’s erasure,
the cells stitching quiet in the dark,
a needle whose language finds its tongue.
I want to hear those stories,
to witness the wreckage.
All the women in our family are seamstresses,
knowing how to stitch a hidden hem.
We are containers,
here in the land of remembered things.
This is our history, where we go, we walk on bones.
There exists ways of listening.
Unreel a bit more of yourself each time.
When the hum arrives, hum back
like a flower of sound opening, into a trumpet,
a wishing moon, a slipper of ancient rock,
a goddess, a wink, a dream of wildness.
There is a knocking in the blood.
It hurts to love the world.
What if we remembered the shy soul in everything
that joins two selves like a hinge,
the way we slip stitch and knot this love.
For the moment we’re mirrors,
but there’s this stitch and the next
coming together into a circle.
I know something of the pull,
to be swallowed by
that brief kinship, of hold and hand.
I’m trying to soften
the raw places
to find a way to
set things in motion,
planting my secret seeds,
honeyed and slow
abundance.
~ A cento, using lines/phrases from the following books: All the Fierce Tethers, essays by Lia Purpura Blade by Blade, poetry collection by Danusha Laméris Entwined, Three Lyric Sequences, poetry by Carol Frost Hereafter, fiction by Sarah Freligh The Hurting Kind, poetry collection by Ada Limón Telling the Bees, a poetry collection by Cathryn Essinger Maps of Injury, poetry collection by Chera Hammons Everything Gets Old, poetry collection by Grace Curtis
For every assembly line worker
who ever built an electric vehicle,
fast becoming a religious act.
America is addicted to oil….
— George W. Bush
To build
to drive
to pass by
all pumps
while singing
Cohen’s Hallelujah
(the lyrics altered
of course)
These are holy acts
high-tech tikkun olam*
Worldwide
cities bake
earth cracks
Seas seethe
with lavic anger
killing coral
drowning islands
driving schools away
There is no master switch to stop it
Only a long road
in cars charged
with a single
message—enough!
GPS the way to Sinai
There we shall park
A new commandment
awaits Mosaic masses
shall read it to
gas-addicted nations
Thou shalt not
despoil the planet
Program it to
our on onboard
computers
Engage our engines
freed from spark plugs
and all things internally
combustive
Drive on to spread
the good news
Eventually though…
we must pull over
slide to the passenger side
let other believers drive
We have tried
to turn back
from blindly
mapped destruction
It is not you to finish the work,
neither are you free to desist from it,
Rabbi Tarfon has taught.
Drive on.
* Tikkun Olam is a Hebrew phrase and concept meaning to repair the world.
summer…
neon dream journey
nowhere zen road
radio night
cruising dark highways..
ginger teacup moon
