Taken from the Spine

bloodletting & miraculous cures
behind the scenes at the museum
alone of all her sex
paris was a woman
loitering with intent
to kill a mockingbird –
the door into summer.

salt fish girl
salt fish girl,
interpreter of maladies,
when fox is a thousand
always
never let me go.

fugitive pieces
tender buttons leaving earth
eight cousins, tender is the night
the children of men voyage in the
dark green shadows, white whale, ammonite
a mouthful of air taken at the flood
tales from the thousand and one nights
the book of small fugitive pieces
charms for the easy life.

Wait! Now, go back to the beginning and touch each line in turn. And, if you like this sort of poetic puzzle, make sure to check out For 20 weightings.

Being in love with a bear

It’s awkward being in love with a bear 

First off, what can you say to the parents? 

You can say, “He’s dedicated to work 

’Cause, Dad, bearhood is no song and dance 

No beer, no skittles, no coffee breaks

Eating offal from seals takes real stamina.” 

You can say, “Daddy, at least he’s white and 

Remember what you said about Angelo 

Yes you did too say that and I was so 

Ashamed I wouldn’t visit you for months and –”

Yes, such arguments divert the parents 

But truth told, being in love has got to be 

Awkward, standing hair on end. 

Image: Catrin Welz-Stein.

HEY! (The already-outdated kimchi taco chant)

HEY! is the new hi rooibos the new chai

gluten is the new egg yolk fake’s the newest fur

kimchi the new taco and gambling new tobacco

for hipsters the new yuppies labradoodles their new puppies

sigh for rhinos the new dodos clap for katniss the new frodo

winning hunger like a new board game but HEY!

HEY! it’s the new hi syria’s in the news why
war is lame the new retarded like wispy bangs the new cross-
     parted
HEY! they’re the next hi and netflix the new sky’s
got ben the latest batman wearing cheetah: the new black. HEY!

Image: Steamy Kitchen.

Orchard Kiss

Marianne had been having another spell where she could not stop talking about what life would have been like in the city. She was laying on the chesterfield with her eyes jammed shut, but her body like a bird in a shallow grave, and Clyde no longer knew what a man could say. He remembered their first kiss, years back. They’d heard a train whistling, past the orchard, and Marianne broke off the kissing to say how romantic it’d be, being on a train, going somewhere. Maybe he should’ve thought clearer back then, but her hair had smelled like quinces.

Image: The Garden of Eating.

The Shadow Stranger

Behind you, a stranger waits in the shadows. Not with a knife in hand, not with oiled whispers, nor with a trenchcoat lined with knockoff watches and a tale of woe. A quiet stranger, a stranger like you but unlike, with a left side like your right and vice versa. A stranger who kneels beneath your chair and leans her forehead against the wall, who licks at its white leaded paint and tastes the white as darkness, and dark as light. She hopes you’ll play a record soon. The sound of all that silence in the room just deafens her.

Photo by Melodie McDaniel
For other posts inspired by this image, see The Mag.

Jump Rope Rhymes for a New Millenium

Skip, Momma Pony’s name is Pounce
Kitten’s name is Clop
Daddy, he cuts heads off
In the barbershop.

Sister likes the breast
Brother likes the thigh
Momma left us years ago
Daddy don't say why.

So, skip, Momma!
Skip, Momma!
A one, two, three
Back to your little family.

Yeah, skip, Momma!
Skip, Momma!
Anyone can see
How you miss your little family.

Sister’s Making MuffinsSister’s in the kitchen
Little Brother’s out in back
Sister’s making muffins
Little Brother's smoking crack.

When Sister heats the oven
Little Brother’s getting high
But Sister’s making muffins
Sugar muffins make her fly.

Image based on Skipping Vinegar Girl by flickrsquared.

The Ballad of Lonesome Lake

Baby’s softly sleeping
Momma’s fast awake
This time she hears the Devil
Cross the lonesome lake.

Momma clutches Baby
Cold in every pore
Hears Devil hooves a-scraping
Cross the wooden floor.

Baby wakes up crying
Momma strokes his head
Feels Devil horns a-growing
Sees eyes of crimson red.

She backs into the table
Takes the skillet pan
Cries, “Devil, leave my Baby!”
Smites him best she can.

Now Baby isn’t sleeping
Baby cannot wake
Baby’s head is sticky like
Syrup on a cake.

Momma ties her hair up
In a steady knot
Waiting for the angels
By sweet Baby’s cot.

Image: Hangman's Tree, by Przemysław Pielecki.

Momma's Got a Leopard Lighter

Momma’s got a leopard lighter
Fingernails of scarlet red
Daddy: he’s gone missing
I wonder if he's dead . . .
 
Cuz I read Daddy’s letter
Saying: Momma’s got a flame
Burning ’neath her collar for
A man on Colson Lane.

Said he saw them, wild and
Kissing, like creatures in a zoo
Now he’s a vacant corner
Can’t tell what he might do.

Said he’ll despise her always
And he'll drink a pint of lye
Said – in ink all sorry
Coloured like his eyes –

That he'll love Momma always
Like desert-loving rain . . .
Well, Momma’s leopard lighter
Burned his leavings all the same.

Cinemagraph by Jamie Beck

Thirty-Seven Point Nine Words

They say there’s forty words for snow.
None, though
for thirty-seven point nine degrees
of Celsius.

The flip-flop of doubt as sandals melt,
not into tar, as they are wont,
but onto concrete sidewalks, floating
sideways into slow repose as strangers
chatter into iced cafés, pile up
in tales of wilt and pushing fluids
(Getting old is hell, says Alan,
shouldering his laptop,
don’t get old.)

Time closes.
Sprinklers at 346 go on  
and here at thirty-seven odd degrees,
headlights shine through the mists in flowing
goldfish tails that once, impossibly,
were arctic snow.
 
Oh, no,
this won’t get old.

Image: K. Bischoping.

We Reached The Lucky Seven

(to the tune of The House of the Rising Sun)

Warren ran down barefoot
Ginny knelt and gave me tea
And pulled the rusty cat away
From the hole that was Rafe’s knee.

They set him on the table
Four sharp screams and then none
Ether and the hacksaw blade
He’d reached oblivion.

My hand went for the ether vial
Four inches left, then three
Sweet Ginny kicked me in the shin
Can’t you leave that ether be?

Warren told her keep on stitching
Said drink your tea down, son
I lay staring in the rusty mug
For sweet oblivion.









Image: Mylittlethriftstore.

While Disease Had Come to Live at Lowood

While disease had come to live at Lowood
     Death its frequent visitor
While gloom within the passages
     Steamed with hospital smells
While drug and pastille strove all in vain
     Against mortal effluvia
 That bright May shone

Unclouded over bold
     Hills and woodland out of doors
As the garden glowed, hollyhocks sprang
     Tall as trees, lilies opened
Roses bloomed red, little bordered beds
     Were daisy-blithe with pinks
Sweetbriars scented morn

And evening with their spice
     Of apples – treasures fragrant
Useless all
     For most of us in Lowood
Except to furnish, now and then
     A blossom handful
To leave inside a coffin.


Text based on Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë. Image of Helen and Jane from tumblr.com. Posted to dVerse Poets.

Red as . . .

Red as wagons
As Nana’s box that Squirrel came in
As fat wax candles and first nail polish
As stripes on ribbons in typing class
As filing folders, print on sugar packets, Persephone’s
        three-seed lunch and Diet Coke
As in walks an office fantasy . . .
Red as the east, eight hundred million little books and all
        the signs that time in Chinatown
As blood, as an apple, a Gala, Campari, a slapped cheek,
        the veins of a Jonathan and recklessness

As eyes at sunrise

And his eyes, years later, from the blood-thinners
As a tea found only in Canada
As pity.


Red Rose Tea, advertised with the slogan "only in Canada, pity", used to include a Wade figurine in every box. Figurine image by permission of Fabulously Fun Finding on etsy. Posted to dVerse Poets.

For 20 weightings

For bescarved doctors who
In those nights of topaz
Watched an eagle land up
On the moon
Now greyed knickerknackers
They’re hobbling toward
Heaven and gingersnaps
Just before noon.

For emergency callers
(True-hearted apostles)
Bringing pestos amore
To an ex with one eye
For pipers who pipe in
The cricketing team
So eagerly snubbed by
The zenith of tween.

For a hoarse gambler stalling
For Slurpees, for hope
Or towers to cease
Falling free
For a young—and rainy—river’s road
Beneath the chestnut-
Crayoned trees . . .

For 20 weightings on your heart
This poor small labyrinth of art.

Wait! Now, go back to the beginning and touch each line in turn. And, if you like this sort of poetic puzzle, make sure to check out π recalled.

Image from MyMaze.

I am a poem, but I’m not gonna hurt you

I am a poem, but I’m not gonna hurt you.
(See how I'm not beginning with any weird fogs
On little cat feet
Or Tyger-Tygers, burning bright
But a promise like some simple dog?)

We could be simple together.

No rhymes, no schemes
None of those, like, metaphors
No being read stupid aloud by Mr. Fergusson the
    year you’re doing Romeo and Juliet and his wife
    leaves him and his default sweater and he stops and
    tells the class: Poetry can hurt you
(and cries).
No next day, when they say he’s on leave.

No strange quiet months after that.


Image based on The Tyger, by William Blake.

Pi-Dogs and Circles

Some domesticated beasts have wild descendants whom we've forced to make their own ways in the world. In Montmartre cemetery, feral cats leap at dusk from behind Nijinsky’s gravestone; others rove our Parliament Hill. In Yemen, yellow pi-dogs are said to tell the news each night to a certain prophet in his tomb. Cast out and unbounded, the ferals circle back, observing.
     Meanwhile, we tell ourselves countless tales of wolves, bears, and ape-mothers Kala taking in Romulus, Remus, Atalanta, Tarzan. So few of them are true. Do we repeat them because we long to be wild? Or forgiven our infidelities?

Image: Hannah Swithinbank.

Pocahontas

A horse spoke to me on the St. Clair West streetcar
A miniature horse on a grey winter day
I reached down to pat it as it lay sleeping
Coat matted a little, flattened from play
Its peeling hooves kicking, albino-rose bath toes,
Pocahontas, it wheezes, Pocahontas, don’t go.

Why Pocahontas? Are you a lost
And a foreshortened ghost horse
Forever careening down colonial trails?
Each time doomed to miss her
Each trace growing older
Don’t leave me, my princess –
Comes your warning
Too late.
    
Or is Pocahontas a missed after-
School special?
My plainting little pony
Your inhaler’s misplaced.

Image: SprinklesInTime. Posted to dVerse Poets.

%, sigil for hashes

In Perl, % is the sigil for hashes. Perl, language of debutantes in long oyster satin gloves. Not spoken, but drawn through the dust keeping vigil in the powder room. The hash function maps each possible key to a unique slot function. If – and only if – one glove slithers off, leaving its debutante behind, that’s a sure tell a one-armed bandit has absconded with it, off to play the slots for double diamonds, one up on the deb. She’s waltzing alone, a glass with three cherries – how uncultured! – in the remaining glove, the other hand behind her back, fingers crossed.

Posted to dVerse Poets.

Two Poems on An

jane is jane
what were the parents thinking
the rain falls on the plain
the solid and unblinking
ann is an
article indefinite
a suitcase without tags
a promise from a profligate
a message washed in sand
my waiting room confederate.

           proficient ann
           prolific ann
           ann is an historian
        the past pluperfect at her hand . . . but trickling
   through the ampersands, evading
                 ann’s aligning hand, grains drift
          upon her planking floor in
     sighs of ans, in
ebbs
        of a knife-green and undulating strand of vast beguiling
                            continent, where corals reef and plankton
                       roar out: atlantis!
   (or a glimpse of it)
      singular
                           indefinite


Image: K. Bischoping

Occasional table dreaming

An overture. An orange peel. The ocean’s opalescent eels. The onerous drains. Auteurial games. The au courant says au revoir when, au début, it thought of you – now ordinary, then so strange. The open windows overlook an oleander’s opaque scent, the aubergines loll on the vine, a two-hand nocturne skips a beat. Occasionally, a table stands, an oval whorl tipped to its feet. A heap of books slips slideshod off and Dover Beach falls to the oak – Opa! Olé! Oohs and ah, love, let us be true. The table sways, tiptoes a ways, again it sits, again to sleep.

Image: Matthew Arnold with Occasional Table, by K. Bischoping
Part of dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night.

The Fire

The furious forest fire fought, those flaming fires almost won, the fair of heart fast flung the art the faded fortress walls were hung – a festive frieze, four fripperies, a limpid fawn in furbelows, a scorched and sunburnt fenwood girl, her fenwood arrows and her bow. (“Fourteen Left Faint” fretted tin-type flyers furnishéd by dawn.) And hunted by the flatfoot guard, the fire-setter from Fife was torn between the fishponds of remorse and fiddleheaded stalks of hope, a farandole of fears he trod, a figure eighty-eight with tropes and fluteful hops of frolic cheer: His long-lost fenwood bride was near.

Image based on Diana Hunting by Guillaume Seignac.