Tag: poetry

Short Nameless Reveries

Violent silence
Screeches tangerine
Like a bone-jagged zap down the jawline.
When your eyes snag mine, hook-lining,
A last moth-winged utter
dissolves into an Aurora, a finger-
Prick drawing blood,
Crawling the back of my throat.

You’ve miraged from
Phantasmal hot coals, the vapor
Pulsing my brain,
Startlingly flesh and bones and scattering flying things—

Small Birds

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/