April 2018 – Page 5 – Ana Celeste Poetry

Not a baby bird

I’d been walking cross the mesa snow swathed in down and speckled wear, alone
And bathed by moonshine there in bare pastel
when I palmed the onion in my pocket. Basking in the shadowed cleft.
I tucked my head to my breast
like a mother-robin and smoothed the layered ruffs
On my scarved chest and on the onion skin,
waited for it to warm my palm,
beckoning a phantom pulse
Expecting it to beat.

But its globule one-pound started, pulseless,
Only rustled and shed flakes when my hand opened round the bud
To join in on the snowfall
The waveless and white
The waterless lake
To punctiliously fill a single foot print which I made
Despite which I’d still etched each step,
pressing the soft birch in parallel, hot-iron soles, taciturn brands
steaming depressions as neat as first stitches in a seamless quilt.
A thread-straight line abandoning trees for freelancing the aimless,
frameless terrain
With my
wrapped and
Nameless self, willing
The lifted onion to evaporate up-swirl behind my pace.

Freshly wounded rimes

Meticulous Landscaping: A Sonnet*

Here in the passenger side lie Wendy’s bags crumpled by boots
The gentle pungent mulch compacts beneath each nail
Picking at the leather seats to stroke the tattered brail
And decode Dad’s lesson of the day like stringed stray roots:
Roots you tossed mulch over, the mornings of summer through July.
Disembarking the diesel F450 with silver smokestacks,
You’re mapping on your hands the clay-dried, thorn-bruised cracks
Wiping the Wendy’s grease on your sister’s off-brand “Nike” slacks
Step out into the cicada-thick air where, like Wendy’s, you fry.
You let the grass prick your bare calves and adjust in the sticky bed
Wiping soil across your forehead, swatting away flying things
And quietly recoiling from the grubs unearthed as dad sings,
Something he beat-boxed under his breath about marriage and rings-
Wash your hands in the cold hose-water until they turn Wendy-hair red.

*This poem was featured on the Cornell University Press blog for National Poetry Month, and can be found here under the following tags: civil rights, gender, national poetry month, poetry, women’s studies
https://sagehouse.blog/

Freshly wounded rimes

Fold.

When I sit straight at this white page

I am crisp. Taut

Like a bright paper crane.

Edges and flat cuts, the folds

Of theater flyers

And wrinkled tape- Smashed against

Windows on the wavy interior

Of thick pop restaurant glass in the

Rain-gloom TV static New York,

A child passes

Brushes a hand across the glass numbly

Fleeting away like the touch-down-fly

Birds I remember from my old house,

Fat and impossibly light

From between the French doors against where

I could never catch one fully in my eye.

It means that I’m expired. That

I succumbed to myself a relentless

Generator pulsing out black tick marks and headaches

And disappointing sketches, smearing

The walls of each tiny white room that

I find in the crumpled in-jams

Of contracting origami.

About

My Work

Throughout the development of this organic collection of poetry I will assign categories based on whatever I feel best captures the essences of certain clusters of poems, snippets, and thoughts. This might mean that, sometimes, there may be an ambiguous category of poems titled something seemingly incomprehensible and conceptual, like freshly wounded rimes, for example. I hope that these categorizations will create unique and potent showcases of particular emotions and experiences. Thanks for reading!

Photo: A snapshot from my favorite little shop on the planet in upstate NY: Mockingbird Paperie.

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
-Maya Angelou