Tag: writing

Tang of Chlorophyll

Flowers coagulate in the

living room you can’t see

because I have strung ten thousand

chandeliers from the foil ceiling.

The season is polished,

a wave of salt rolls over

the soil at the other end of the street

but here is nothing but

the tang of chlorophyll and breath.

Enclosed in my equatorial dress,

I am as a letter to the star,

whose power I painted

electrical in a posh home,

mixed media mural on my ceiling,

cheap imitation regality.

The ground shakes.

The scent of salt

blossoms from the door.

Tears in my pale eyes,

petals shriveling.

And still my lights do not

go out.

Ice, Shopping, Magazine

Yesterday our world was smothered by ice. A fog rolled in during the afternoon, and then all of it froze. Every blade of grass was covered in white icing. Every street was a skating rink. It was too risky to drive anywhere, so we stayed in by the fire. Our house feels so cozy with the new sofa and my new painting and my lamp decorated for the autumn/winter season.

Today I went to At Home, then drove for awhile, then went to Trader Joe’s. I came home and began to work on revising and posting some poetry, when I suddenly got so tired I had to lay down. I just got up. The only reason I’m up is because it was time for our wonderful babysitter, G, to go home and I wanted to hear about Angelica’s day and sign G’s log book for her hours.

I am hoping to write tonight after Craig goes to bed early for his second day shift. He’ll go to bed around 6. I haven’t written fresh poems in weeks due to..problems.

I revamped the magazine! The literary magazine I founded and edit has been on hiatus for awhile. Summer was filled with instability and travel, as was the fall. I contacted Duotrope and got the magazine listed to show up in searches for several genres and styles. I hadn’t realized it before, but the way my little litmag was listed it only showed up under general searches – along with thousands of others. If anyone searched for their particular genre or style, which most people do, my magazine wouldn’t have shown up.

Now I’m looking for science fiction, poetry, art, horror, magical realism, memoir, the supernatural (no, I don’t mean Twilight fanfic), poetry chapbooks, and more. I want my magazine to be one of the best – not necessarily by ranking, but from publishing interesting writing. Basically the magazine will be part poetry, part weird or dark writing, and part art. Photography, painting, glass, etc. It might seem eclectic, but I am making a magazine that I want to read. I hadn’t opened my mind to much genre fiction before, but I love it and nothing would make me happier than to have some dystopian fiction and horror in my inbox. It feels a little odd to mix that in with poetry, but I will see how it goes.

I redesigned the site as much as I could without the help of an actual web designer. I changed the banner, made new pages, updated the about and submissions pages etc. Hopefully it looks nicer.

Alien

Blackest black-purple

my voice returns to me

dragging shackles.

What vertebrate ghost did this?

A legacy of ice floes through

my life

High tea in hell.

They look so refined.

I close the broken window.

The wind turns back.

After the fire

ash sifts through the air

looking for something left

to land on

finds only my hollow hands.

My voice climbs over my tongue as

a weary and alien being.

My artistically rendered

silence leaks from my nailbeds.

The sky is black,

black purple,

and I am invaded.

Benzos

Bending benzos,

bows over my fraught mind.

Madame Rainbow,

Messieurs Blood and Cloud.

Somewhere in the city

Freud soaks my jaws

in alkaline water.

My tongue has always been

a working girl.

In my perspiring frontal lobe,

a waltz coated in epoxy.

Madame,

You have wrapped me like a gift

regifted.

Messieurs, I must dash.

My fun is running away

too fast!

Loaned and Leased

In some paisley antithesis

to paradise

a swan defaults on her loan.

When water is rented

and love is leased,

how can we have enough

spoons to gnaw our way through

magnified day?

In the kitchen,

patience burns tea

while virtue gets drunk on

the last of my Italian wine.

The swan will not leave the bank.

Her babies are buried there.

Below an investing, rippled surface,

a fish surveys the

inescapable purveyors of loss.

Some Idea About Birds

Supermarket cool,

I saunter down the avenue,

acknowledging height with a nod.

Perched on a chain link fence,

bleeding,

some idea about birds.

I wept once,

and the bluejays turned a

mysterious shade of wisteria.

Spectral women love the glitz

more than me,

which is to say they don’t love

me at all,

which is to say I love glitz.

In my own plastic Paris,

The shops sell angelic wings

sewn with glistening webbing.

Yesterday’s neighbor

smiles benevolently on me,

her eyesight restored,

her loneliness a cloud on

her daughter’s rooftop in

the city of breath.

I am a trespasser here,

A bird in the stratosphere.