Tag Archives: poetry

On Acquiescence and Its Opposite

By Posted in Agoraphobia, Poetry, Questions Tagged , , , , , 4 Comments
 
She gets quiet after each full moon, her intuition waning almost immediately. Before, a culmination exploding, something more than ever could be. But now, all of her eyes, swollen and foggy, lock from the inside. She takes, again, to eating flowers. Floating on the thin nest of spider silk and honeyed salamander skin, she watches the heaving trees. How do they withstand so much? Each gust a battering snarl crawling hard from cloud to bough to trunk to deep root shiver. She bends not nearly so much. All back ache and bruised knee. All busted lip and broken skin. On the edge of the dew damp bushes one crow thrashes its morning meal. The snake, like an old worn out shoelace, flops dead in the bird’s clenched beak. 
Gallery

This Is Forgetting

This gallery contains 9 photos.

  We couldn’t do it otherwise. Silent through doors, in chairs, legs of and cushions. Press the meat to dried lips, red on red, and wrinkled love. Frozen knots of light flicker through plastic. And once we walked in green and fallen brush and spring. We lurk and trample. Leave scars. Creep slowly across the wall. Imagine we know something of […]

Ritual No. 51

By Posted in Ethnographic Surrealism, Poetry, Questions Tagged , , , , Leave a comment
 
The last April rains pulled the warm perfume from the withering blooms. Subtle aromatic almost gone sweetness invested with a breath of stench. All goes green soon and even the rain makes it so. She said, “Remember the flowers,” but we slept and soon forgot. Stepping from linoleum to concrete to carpet to plastic to blacktop to concrete to brick to linoleum, we decide to play innocent with each inhalation of blueberry, celery, pepper, garlic, chocolate, lavender, bleach, meat and meat and meat. What trick makes us believe this is the world? What trick makes us never even ask such a question? She bathes herself in smoke and rosewater, drips essence of gorse, sweet chestnut, cherry plum, and crab apple. In the end it isn’t enough. The brick in her throat remains regardless of how much oil she swallows. Reaching up through the old gash in her belly, she can wiggle the nested brick, but never quite enough to mean anything like real movement. She doesn’t utter a sound. The roses puff and unfold. Understand, this was all we knew of red. Now, the books, these sheaves of paper, this floor, ceiling, walls, shelves, this door, all covered in an explosion of roses. Our eyes battered also with all we mistook for abundance. What glamour is added now and what hush? This place a pathway. What crushes us more, the intention or the loss? 
Gallery

This Is Still

This gallery contains 12 photos.

In this there is a lie. I’ve pulled the bindweed from your mouth for the last time. I am still. I sit locked. But see how everything moves. Pull the coolness from these stems these leaves these flowers. In place of petals only stone and shell. A crawling where your teeth were. You are so […]

Ritual No. 72

By Posted in Ethnographic Surrealism, Poetry Tagged , , , , 2 Comments
 
The strands of her hair are strung with a thousand eyes. Glossy wet marbles rattle and blink with each swelling current, each plume of hot vented air. All day the washing and now its reward. She radiates frenzy in blue orange flashes. There is safety in this. The knowing of what is done and what is yet to come. Her protective adaptation. Her cup is filled with new water and the ashes of stars. Above the wooden fence are eyes. Between the slit of the curtains always eyes. Next door every night constant smothering never turning eyes. The chasm in the brick wall breathes its balmy fragrance into her lungs. Vapor and dizzy and vision and gaze. Adder and moon snake perch peaceful on branches. Three doves swoop from the nest of lint in the dying oak tree. The slick grassy mud slides to swallow her feet. She slips, sinks, plants herself deep in the framed night garden. Her supplicants burn bay laurel, eat bindweed leaf and seeds. Swoon and stumble and watch and wait. Their silent earnest eyes ask and ask, pressed closer and closer against splinters and glass.