I.
Heat/front seat: the pulse of the dragonflies
Just where the woods are torn away;
You see them lift...dip where it bleeds.
A corona burns through the window
Until the eye glazes blank to ocean--
Waves break, so neighborhoods grow
Cream houses blank to the sunset
Where we turn right, onto old memories.
Tires take the concrete pulse of place
While we look for the driveway, talk
About boxes, tape, markers, and reach,
At the last turn, for each other's hand.
II.
Whicker of butterfly wings
In the dropped cape of sun I step beyond
As the path gathers more shade
In my mind, always, cool shadows birth
Tigers deep in the park's bamboo
Where the whispers slide against the grove
Heat and breeze keyboard
Blind across my skin as the winter scales
Shed dry to pond's edge, tan to
Greening concrete in February's starveling sun
A great black vulture
Sheds a shadow slant among the pines
A phantom trunk falling
Over the water like a bridge to a chorus.
III.
If they renovated the complex, built over the road;
If none of it remains familiar, we've learned it new;
If none of us remain friends, are we still?
IV.
Look up! the Heaven band, the upper windshield
Just below, angel's wings, cowbird pinions gleaming
Spring onion savor, sin-dreaming buzzards reaping.
V.
Crow captains our used wisdom, a full skip we float a thousand years out.
Risen plastic coils through Avalon's apples whispering our way points.
VI.
Here on the lunatic surface, de-memed memes,
Forward headless anatomies facing wordless balloons
Everyday empty heroism--her words
These meant what you flung, years later
Your response stumbling into new arguments
Which she bought and hung
In the house that took you three days to clean out
And five canvasses to explain.
Standing on a table, squeezing paint to paper
Slinging the past forward until it fractured,
Splinters lodging in your fingers, your memory
Who never read a comic or quarreled naked through a room
Except in the ordinary way.
VII.
The fear that itches beneath the half-familiar shadows.
Is that who I think it is?
Did the poisoned dragon come back?
Her scale tattoo rises along her breath
Stretching over the memory of the lover who struck it
Deep in her skin, she hums the road she fled along
To her husband who sleeps, scale-less, beside.
Oh, poisoned eternity recovers.
She feels the itch as it scars beneath her t-shirt
Mundane cotton reigniting an occult fizz and chill
Coiling nerves burning against the scatheless scales
Where the dragon was picked clean.
Is that who I think it is?
Half-familiar shadows itch beneath the fear.
VIII.
There is one way to cling to a stuffed fox
At forty, in the bookstore: add it to the pile of books,
Tuck it facing out, as if you remembered
Toys like to look out.
This one was balanced on the clearance table,
His back to the cafe hum sparking laughter from whispers
An exile from the children's shelves
Silent in my company.
IX.
My subconscious believes that going back to school
Means knowing:
-- About the communal peanut butter
-- That we hoard tiny food packets
-- Empty, white midnight hallways
-- Soda only comes in Styrofoam cups
Means denying Kevin hijacked the intercom for light jazz
Means no printed diploma ever did more than preface a nightmare
Means more empty halls and pocket student universes
Studded along the night.
X.
His eyes were still deadly, but he kept them closed.
There was no carpet on his floors, claw clicks woke him.
Doors had been removed, rooms were left open
And he would have slain Sleep if it had come for him
Like a hero, which it never did, and he never slew it.
Some people prefer cats, but dogs are better.
I like the snap of jaws on the woken swarm.
I hate the sight of a cat silent, staring while devouring
My vampire dreams.
Velvet black wings flutter and he snaps,
Dragging the butterfly from my hair, tangled
Wings melting in my tears like mascara,
Its venom, monstrous wine.
My scalp itches and I scratch the dog
As he rolls over to scan the soft shadows.
He licks dark streaks across my palm.
They're getting thicker.
XI.
Nana does. Mommy does.
A toddler snuggled against the vinyl slats and floppy bags
On the mall bench near me. I looked up to see the underside of
the rain.
I can’t walk the rain.
Fifteen minutes from opening, can lights off in the liquid
morning
The woman nearby smiled at the girl and then at me.
Just a few minutes.
If you look up at the right angle, their faces cut
From the transition places, edge of clouds, opening times
Hold my hand.
I keep my eyes on Sephora glowing like Paradise behind a gate
As the light above splatters into a glass-bottomed shower.
XII.
Bees and hummingbirds enforce the stillness
But we forget, an old bumper cast into a paved placeholder,
Hinted driveway arcing to no home against the backyards
We forget ourselves to them, backwards formality
Shells neatly parked, tireless, in weeds
So that we can hear our silence in the unbuilt.
XIII.
Rain falls so lightly the spiderwebs look as if they’re
strings
Of fairy lights, ready to blaze.
The wild herms have borne their fruit and now crouch
Beneath the sprays of hummingbird nectar.
Music rolls through my head, a song of the moon
Melted into electric waves.
XIV.
A breeze slipped cool around her neck as she knelt
Closer to the sharp refractions of the dew, around her arms
The air curled and to her wrist it swept.
Then pulled tight, icy metal tight against her skin
As a voice behind her said Might as well gather my diamonds
While you're secured to my whim.
She shivered and shook and slapped her wrists
As if the chains were webs and stuck only to break
If given a swift twist.
It was a fair catch, my girl, the voice laughed
You gather them up. Buy your freedom with dew
If you’ve any of the careful craft.
XV.
What color am I to bees? To butterflies?
In the inflection of their dance
Am I word or punctuation?
Lizards race—my shadow a flag that drops.
Only leaves in simulated skittering
Know me careless as they know the wind.
XVI.
This is the conversation.
You missed the first part, perhaps
An argument I agree with but found sad;
There is always an example, yes?
You are overhearing this, assuming I’m writing
Toward you and not back to her, to the piece you missed,
The part I heard, or read, or glimpsed.
Always an example of our grief,
A loose step, a wide margin, and the present crack.
I want to catch them, chase them like leaves—
What would I press them in?
Why press the sadness, why soak the sorrow between pages?
Catch them, falling, like whirligigs
Hold them, spinning, like dancers.
Remember them.
But what were we saying?
A catch of conversation, you thought I was talking to you
Justifying a memory or renewing one.
My nephew’s mother, on our couch, foreshadowing him.
XVII.
Flies and mayflies—adder’s rest—the brief and the ongoing
deterioration
Helicopters drift from the room, buzz and dust
Anxiety
above the weeds and wildflowers.
XVIII.
I think the match is startled when the sulfur meets the scrape
The grass will always smell like dirt with the green day
crushed within
The bags released will dance but each alone and only to
deflate
Those days are past that smelled like ink and math, Roger then
laments.
XIX.
In an unreal season, with stars on the ground
Leaves like handprints on the ground
An entire village the season of one tree
The reality is, these hollow logs
Are only big enough for squirrels,
For all the marvels you can see.
They are kaleidoscopes to Faerie, not gates.
XX.
The kids meet again to fish when the cliff house settles
And the bedroom that they shared one summer
Yawns into the waves.
In the folded angel huddle of a tent they remember
Church songs, radio songs;
Hours chip from the foundation, days slip
Into the nets they've strung between them.
They pull the brightest to the table.
They watch the waves race Heaven to Paradise
And the dreams they once docked
Call their toes and then their souls
Into the water.
XXI.
On white shadow mornings when the bodies of mosquito hawks
Are like the noses of small dogs against the knee
There, on a concrete curve, will I sight the land.
Serrated clouds lift the sky, a visible sliver slips
Into sight like a tear wept from dreaming gods
Galloping on the face of the water.
So...yeah...I'm having to clean out some data stored on my phone, some of which was poetry and has to be retrieved by hand. Combined with the gorgeous inspiration image from The Sunday Muse (which I am posting on a Tuesday because...reasons), I was put in mind of how much lighter one feels when one cleans out a room or a phone or a stack of poems. And I had a stack of poems to potentially 'clean up.' Anyway, if you've made it this far, many, many, many thanks. I hope that your week contains more lightness and brightness than shadow and weight.
-- Chrissa
