Rivers run through my names, scoffing at the idea of unified identity and advantageous silt. Along one river is a boat named the Unbearable Blue. Named for Memory’s daughter – a blue so deep it makes me ache. My heart goes spastic. Horrendous banana flavored vanity leaks out on the floor like an unsupervised ocean. Help. The sharks are here with their collection of teeth and wits.
Month: November 2024
Fridays
Frilly Fridays get friendly with Sundays, barely leaving a leave shaped hole for Saturday to breathe in. the good times don’t roll. They’re octagonal. My education was hormonal and orange. The weeks wear Friday as a fancy fascinator.
Rising Tide – Micro Memoir
In Newport, on the side of the road, my family pulled over to play by the sea. I took photos of the water with my little Instax Mini while my father in law watched my daughter. In an instant, the tide starts pouring in. I see my daughter alone on a jetty, my father in law nowhere nearby. I start calling to her to come back. She points to the water and starts to climb in to get back to me. She cannot swim. Frantic, I am sprinting toward her. The sea has claimed so much of me in my dreams. It will not take my daughter from me in what passes for real life
“Til Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown
My boat is small and rickety. It’s just me and the vast blue sea. Suddenly a violent swelling – a wave rising. At first I think the wave will be large and crash momentarily, so I brace myself for impact. But then the wave doesn’t crash down. It becomes ginormous. It looms over me, watching me. “When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” It boils up to a height that makes me miniscule. Then, stillness. So still. If this wave falls down on me, I will drown. But it doesn’t move. It only watches. Until the sound of voices…
Letter K
Wears polka dots and has red galoshes. She smokes hookah when no one is watching, and swigs honey from the hive when they are. She has a 2nd grade education but makes mean cookies. They bite back. On a rainy summer day she kisses the daffodils, her lipstick print on each one like a signature.
Math
The butterscotch center,
That rippled source of math,
Draws me in.
Analytical paintings of crime and punishment
Line the walls.
This old house feels it when I stroke
The lace curtains like a jealous lover.
In the storm cellar,.
Cider and a rift in space time.
Be Real With Me
Your open face is a battleground. Behind your eyes, artillery. Every champagne glass will shatter the night you turn into a fish, and I will lap the champagne off the floor with my tongue like a kitten. Be real with me. The cold sheen of your lips tells me when you lie.
Zeitgeist
The zeitgeist is entertaining, is shredded, is mad. My mercurial hair flies in the breeze of a thousand white fragrances. This age has a stone and a sling shot. This age is not David, but Goliath. God will overcome this blood crusted century like a disease, sewing heaven from His hands like wildflower seed.
Prose Poem – Us
Her wet voice is the breeze among the lilacs. Her face turned upward like a graph, displaying shiny information encoded in cotton skin. My body is a bridge between two worlds. I dream of the sweet number tattooed on the past.
Getting Ready for the End
Firstly, fashion flits over my face like flickering fire.
Then comes the 6 pound, 12.5 oz scream.
Then the blackness of hungry water.
Down deep below diamonds where water is a dream state
Like Florida glittered with snow,
My smile stretches to accommodate the black pressure
Of shadows squeezed to a paste.
Friendly, the robot makes conversation with me
While he robs me of my fingers.
If the scream should rush back into me, I would die.
My language slips across the grass
In only a slip,
Her nakedness plain to all the angels.
At my vanity,
Choosing a face to wear,
I remember that time on the backporch
When you showed me you loved me.
Miniature Moon 