Scarcity

Hardy tulips in their frivolous, life saving splendor punch holes in the frigid Earth. Life begins with a shriek and ends in a whimper. Scarcity is the justification we use to beat one another to a pulp, and then strain out the personalities and clumps of hair for a juice that will go down smoothly. I’ve always liked my juice pulp free, as though to avoid looking at the once living cells that produced it. In the Garden, a deer delights in the warm friendship of a field mouse. Oranges grow at the periphery. And in this world, people are harvesting one another’s energy like a crop. The tulips sing their purple and yellow song into the purple and yellow birth of Spring.

Seasons

The grifting dawn begs for someone to appreciate her slovenly humidity, but none of us have gils and we are tired of swimming through air so thick that you can hear the water say to it, “Damn, you’re fine!” Summer calls me from a landline and asks me to pick up a movie at Blockbuster, and tell her how the children are enjoying their candy cigarettes. The children bob up and down like balloons, high on the thrill of looking adult. Fall is more subdued. He will write to me with a quill pen and say he isn’t coming, Summer has Heaven’s big brass door locked. Then he comes quietly, all at once. The water rains down on rotting leaves and we celebrate our breath, the rattle of our arthritic bones just beginning to clang as Winter caresses the door handle with her bony white hand.

The Gardener

Space opening up like a rose, me blooming by lightning light. The sinister thing is hunting me in the mountains of Virginia. A sagging porch gives way, and I fall into a dank basement. “I was here” is written on the walls in ginormous neon green spray paint, but the quote is unsigned. Time shimmies in her shift. I have this discombobulated life to live, and my thorns grow inward. In the woods, a predator we the rose faced call, “The Gardener.”

Arboreal Visions

Maps of memory abound with trees. My first breath hangs in a specimen case at a museum. Why all the ravens when even literature, a heavy handed, glimmering thing, runs ragged over a brutal salt mine of a dying culture? On my map, L marks the spot. “L is for loser” the other girl said, looking at my diamond crusted initial necklace. So I cut open my rage and rained on her lagging, unfashionable parade. The first tree you’ll see is the one I used to swing from growing up as a dust bunny in Connecticut. The second is all rich autumn colors in January. Out of the third tree, a cross rises. It cuts open God’s ashen rage and mercy leaks out.

Memory Number 42

Construction paper everywhere. I feel the colors with my fingertips. A rainbow of raw, unfettered childishness and possibility. The garden of papers that was a rainy day recess in Connecticut necessity. I had castles in mind. Later on I would mug Baudelaire and I found the mechanism of “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” ticking away like a watch in his left pocket. On this day, though, raindrops trample over me. My glaring deficiency of virtue and economy are on a television for everyone to marvel at whether they want to or not. Some day in the not too distant past I will get up and turn it off. Fear is an organist playing “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks, over and over again in the corner.

Amniotic Safety

Ebullient daylight argues with darkness at the periphery of my hungry eyes’ territory. All this bickering and no one brought me lemonade or pet penguins. Every time I feel a sour, sticky dream sliding through the folds of my classic brain, I take some pill that probably causes cancer and the manufacturer is just lying about it. In the clouds, a place wet with dreams and warm with an amniotic sort of safety that surpasses all knowledge.

Beige Women

Craving comfort, beige women line their cream homes with white roses. The thorns, being cut off by blunt scissors, bleed their chlorophyll dreams out in the trash can. Some perfect woman will dump them out in compost, saving the world wearing a cable knit chromosome and the greenest eyes. In cold mirrors, I stare back at myself. See the thorns coming from my finger tips, my hands clasped around my own throat?

This is What I Couldn’t Explain to the Aliens

Beneath a gun metal sky of trauma, which grows like a vine throughout all Creation, I play chicken with Death parked in my bathroom cabinet. Will I turn away, or will I succumb? The answer lies in the valleys of existence. This is what I could not explain to the aliens. We must die to ourselves without dying in ourselves, and our growth causes us to constantly shed crude, crunchy casings of our old selves.

Ghosts Clamor

I wedge sentences into paragraphs like door stops. What do I really want to say? I mean to say that frostbite is the only answer to a love that wanders far afield, and that terror is a terrific thing to keep in your backpocket. The cold settles onto the land like a squatter in a fever dream. Ghosts clamor at the edges, longing to steal the living for their games.