on a journey home

fingers slip
the neck of a
dried marigold- i shake seed like
gourded maracas

hum soft
a lullaby

let the breeze rustle
trees into a big band boogie - and think back to my

mother
and the loud music of
her laughter as
she ladled
soup over
steamed noodles

limp
in a round-handled
bowl

a river

over stringed beef
and

bright orange carrots
sopped in
cow fat

and i think of how she loved color

splashed about
every corner

dashes of yellow

speckled reds

and of her own flower beds
plumped with sun
tweaked and pruned while hands could still
fold enough to tame them

and later when her body failed

and black eyed susan spread
beyond clothesline poles
in through the steeples of white wired fence

how she still admired
from her kitchen window

the smiling nods of their black faces

and how she fretted

until one day
ceased fretting

and in a distant
memory i remember

trillium
white-clumping
a spring shore

and my own two hands gathering
straight stems for a small glass vase

i remember too, a
drift of language

grown in the cracks between truth and peace

and inside that particular memory

a log floated
the length of a creek

until hard caught in a dam

my breath caught there too,
at the peak of
a hill

at the top
of a drop

in the span
of a home
no longer
my own
















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m

an agent of change

hundreds of bats

flew black
and returned wingless each morning;
tuckered little mice
laid quiet in rows

do you remember

how strange thumps of night
settled when temperatures dropped and bodies slowed

where does one begin to write bloodied phlegm
on a handkerchief

or the burnished yellow skin of rage

how does one begin and
whom does one ask

when those you would ask
are all silent, laid tuckered in rows

















m


for papa
and ma
and glen...

to steal a star from night

i should come clean against the grass stain of morning
resolve to objectify a cause

let it roar rapid through veins
pump hydraulic against temples

feel my cunt swell; a disobedient child
smooshed and manhandled between thighs

i should raise a wire hanger and fist
scream absolution into the faces of right women, quote leviticus
like a conspiracy

allow protest to drip from my tongue;

raise a blue flag, crawl through a pipe line

stake a new claim

destabilize a small, white holy man
and never once
adorn his suffering with laud
or imagine him alone without a chair, a lamp, a table or a bed

i should walk as night

ferocious and dark;
a determined hunter ready to disrupt the underbelly of a shadow

chain animal noise together;

the soft grunt of a pig
to a rat's scurrying feet


a heavy cow sigh to a rooster's squawk

and toss them 25 yards off a cement bridge; a square jawed ruckus, dropped like soft kittens in a bag

but instead of a mewl, i need a scream

some tension
the tickle of a wet tongue at the back of my knees

if i could
i would steal a night's star


turn it off

until 10 billion eyes watered from the missing

and when i thought they'd had enough
and could suffer no more

i would turn off another and then another

and just before the pith of forgiveness


before tide washed a clean slate, in the heavy moments before

the little white man finger fucks me into submission

i would turn off just one more























m

a bone white moon

bone white; the moon hangs
in a northern sky- i long
to stroke it – finger

skeletal smoothness


pinch a desert pall
and toss as spilled

salt over my shoulder


or perhaps hang the moon
from my rear view
watch as it dances light


if i could collapse the moon

i might laminate it, fold it map-like

and place it in my bottom dresser drawer

tucked beneath linen; this beautiful moon stored
as summer clothing

and on certain nights, when the drawer’s glow

awakens in the perfect shade of blood harvest

i would hold the moon
kiss it hard like stone

and marvel at its relevance













m

a story of smoke signals and colder nights

i am loved by a man
who would wrap me in grapevine

drag hip and hair through hayfields, sing an owl's song in pitch dark



and call me always, his wicked, wicked cell mate, his moon, his north

in a spit

of flame



i am five blue hues
six passive notions
and a lean toward the door handle

none of which casts a warm glow or earns proper ceding


and on a dark stretch of night
i hum an unplanting
of dogma
of fire
of a dormant daisy, long since bloomed pretty
in the ditch; smoke fills the car
maple leaves burn red and orange


and a cat's yellow eyes stare headlights

tomorrow he will not come when called

over and over again
he will not return

my hands are busy creatures; stringing words together, tapping time in my lap, unraveling blue thread from the hem of a coat

the tendency of determination and other misnomers

you had your own language
as winter trees do, all naked limbed and bared teeth;
face in a chattering wind

did you know then, the smell of vicks
would send you now, down snow-filled roads, long shoveled drives

and onto the wings of the chickadee, your head nooked
in a tiny wind-raised tuft of black down

you were small
and imagined things greater, perhaps

the toad and snake were better prepared than you
buried deep beneath mud and leaf, preferable, i suppose
to frozen blood or the trudge of heavy feet

and i wonder, what of the morel; a thin gray species, grown delicate in perfect
circles, gathering strength in dormancy

and then what too, of your mother's purple iris,
and clumped jonquil resting deep in the ditch - will they bloom beautiful still,
even when you are no longer there to love them?













m