
cracks of blue
marbled white
spider-web thin
wisps & whiskers
swaying in light
cracks of blue
marbled white
spider-web thin
wisps & whiskers
swaying in light
“Pears cannot ripen alone. So we ripened together.” — Meridel Le Sueur
My sisters and I would help my father
feed the owner’s cattle. He’d shovel hay
from the bed of the slow-moving pickup,
driverless and pointed in the general direction of home.
In the summer, I would pretend to be left behind
and race back to the truck. In winter, bundled up
with the cab’s heater blasting, we’d watch
the cattle’s eager breath etch a chorus
of hungry moos into the frozen air.
The chore was done when the hay was gone
and we were witnesses to the wavy furred lines
across the barren prairie landscape.
I remember the weight of your loudest threats
mapped onto your hands. You hit us to teach us a lesson,
to be quiet, or because you couldn’t hit the boss.
As we got older, and bigger, you perfected your words
into weapons, making an invisible impact.
Then came the tender gaps of amputated time
when your anger spilled over into vengeance
against those you had declaimed to love so fiercely.
I remember you forced us to move
to the deepest parts of nowhere,
packing your temper and always at your testimony
that this time would be better than the last.
Starting over was the goddamn point when
all you have for a legacy is your name.
That may have been one reason why
no one knew us where we were headed.
Our legacy now an extension of mutual reputation,
much like how only female cottonwood trees
shed their obnoxious cottony seeds
to the most distant, wind-driven places.
we live
in a nervous system
shy regards now a bond
static as panic
we live
where time invites neglect
monied generations
under hot blue skies
we live
in all-cap sentiments
rhetorical as pushing buttons
fragments of sunken places
“…and that is the sentence on repeat in the tapedeck of my chest: How do you go about finding the heart?
[…]
I am amazed by how much people can survive, endure—and how they can go on living, laughing. After thorough devastation, indescribable loss, people’s hearts still beat. People can, still, live. This is perplexing, bewildering news to me. Defies all sense and gravity to me. And yet.”
Thick bands of clouds scroll by — unbothered. The poetics of fragmentation: landscaped yards with lavender, slow growing Japanese maples, bushes of rosemary, hissing palm trees, blushed roses, fuzzy foxtail grasses, vine tendrils straining toward the brightest light, jade trees, announcements of jasmine. Please mute yourself when entering a virtual space. Passive voice writes headlines. Who deserves punishment? A voice reminds us to be careful about seductive victim scripts, leaches of energy. Is having power worth its traded value? For the first time in a long time, we want to continue at the current pace; light holds on longer.
It is June and the radiator is still spitting.