while others chant
Doctor, she know,
she water me strong.
Another petal
spins to the surface
screeching a cobalt gasp.
Enfeeblement Conspires
for Night/Day ... Day/Night by Beryl Goering
Indigo invades the air,
shards the beams’ radar blips —
feral sprints atop jagged cliffs
spiking flushed welts rising
willfully from startled flesh.
Heart (blandly pale) blinks treacle,
stumbles copper,
glimpses patches of glowing green
beat-propelled to worry-me-blue
rhythms sharp, unyielding.
Inky indigo, ebony close behind
thump-clump
till there’s only perspective,
this fevered microcosm beneath the edge,
azure bisecting white sea.
It know you know it there.
Bubbling inside the downward slide
the crystal voice is drowning
as uneven pulse-peaks yellow,
orange, navy away
from opalescent balm
throbbing oracular.
Within the Behemoth a Dulcet Turning
for Blues: It doesn’t matter which way is up by Wendy Weaver
Skin mottled, traitorous throat constricts,
drags down body’s thin dregs spiralling
like a child’s empty shoe spinning on ice.
Ensnared flesh and thought whirl
within the same circuits —
sometimes light’s slim white line,
later the frenzied-orange band quivering
round the final ring: sapphire despair.
Together they orbit their puny field
(a space of their own blind choosing)
bordered by roads never reached,
suspended within charcoal wisps.
Beneath lies the dark.
Time sputters past –
spits and stutters.
You/life she shrivels to body. You/body she
shrivels from life.
Arcs intersect and tumble the sphere
towards luminance lying beyond,
towards patches of fearless yellow.
Propelled by will’s peculiar geometry
orientations roll and right.
The Enigma of Shells
for Snail 2 by Mary Lou Payzant
Pressed into polished folds
beneath concentric coral orbs
she plummets down the rabbit hole
to bronzed flashes of lucent white,
the nub stark at the vortex.
Babbling to her own inner Hatter
she sips Himalayan blackberry tea,
divines the tilt and squeak of the centrifuge.
Antennae project, lovely throat glistens
as she glides majestic through a marbled world —
sentient, expansive with the beauty of breathing,
the wonder of mollusks and redwood.
Charmed beasts share their secrets,
listen to those coiled within her moon.
Earthbound flesh delight in this life.
Heard, spared she snails soft aqua roads
flushed with the radiance of small things.
What Lingers
Terrors
Beyond thin-roofed trees
we bustle
sizzle with edgy deals
thwart dubious time-holes
in mushrooming Dutch dams
maneuver sludge
to keep out
the crash and flow
bloating behind the walls.
Old Business
The refrain shrills,
pierces the pressed hush,
stammers into her ear that song
she’d shushed (feigned, it seems) —
the black/white lyrics
boxed behind her tongue
tuning acid to base.
She sees him
(all tinkly notes and melody)
hissing dismissive arias
at her gawking.
The chords fight forward,
tenor particle-pain,
metronome her eyelids
to a black boot march
as he raises his arm.
Tea Party Twist
in response to Tea Time by Wenda Watt
Afternoon tea beneath a ruffled parasol —
rosette cups, lacy linen,
meringues atop a lavender tray
and she all satin and princess-pink,
French braids and bows.
Along the eyelet bed skirt
beside the sky-blue castle spires
a line of primped Barbies lounge,
gossip about Disney’s happily-ever-after:
the dollop of cream
on a bewitching, russet brew.
Study that drink deeply —
beneath the polished surface,
behind the plastic tiara, glass gems,
clown’s prevaricating grin —
that once-upon-a-time potion
distilled in a faraway enchanted kingdom
where rapt beauties wish upon mauve stars.
Bubble bubble, toil/trouble ––
Words hiss down the neck
to collarbone’s pale shelf,
drop demonically.
Vapors gloss peachy skin,
leech onto bloodlines.
Smile in place the flaxen girl curtsies,
wands the array of delicacies.
Tea anyone?
Waiting to Search Holocaust Records of my Parents’ Enslavement
in response to in the distance by Wendy Weaver
A glass wall frames nature —
denuded trees climbing the hillside,
the clawed clinging to earth.
Pared to fiber their stories speak
from gnarled limbs, snapped branches,
scars tattooed in bark.
Naked in their grayness.
I sit at the window, ponder
the portents, shadow-reminders,
the depth and direction
of these thick roots.
Sadness roils; the ashes
clamp my throat.
In the distance a narrow
road beckons —
Survivors, they vanquished
starvation, the brutal indignities
of relentlessness,
found scraps of potato peel,
black bread crust,
the hymn their mothers sang.
They grabbed life’s palette,
clothed their exposed flesh
with hues of hope’s compassion.
Coronary Red
The body’s heart moves blood,
lives within a cage thumping.
Red/black slave camps stalk wife and husband,
poach their will while
brutality bleeds behind their lids,
haunts visceral cantorial melodies.
Within balanced chambers the harmony:
current double-pumped
into and beyond right
to bounty, back and out.
Heart wears an arterial crown.
Their crowns have nascent thorns
grown from tortured sorrows, unvoiced screams,
the weight of dust-bones borne on their backs.
Beat, beating, beat, beating, beat, beating contracts,
propels blood, squeezes precious chambers small.
&nbs
p; Relaxed cavities gorge,
valves alert and thorns
clump, dig root-deep in fleshy fallacy.
Steadfast they deny further fascist triumphs:
elect to dance instead of keening,
generations over annihilation.
Blood-river stagnant, pump
failed, body pleads.
Her heart attacks, stabs through bars —
her delicate ribbed cage. It blades.
Too much, she says. Let me go.
His body trembles, mourns her silver song.
He shuffles forward following blood’s pulse.
Crimson blackness morphs and moves,
taunts his tender strength, the yearning ––
Halts.
Milky palms gather the sparks.
The spherical motion of the May rake
for Falling Leaves by Beryl Goering
breaks their clutch, its tines churning
ghostly leaves blanched winter-dumb,
others thinly yellow as hymnal pages,
umber edges grasping the few
still stained red with falling memory.
Spent pine needles dull as a dowager’s hair
submit to twigs, their sturdy treeness.
Exiles in phantom darkness meek leaves, quills, and cones
rouse pell-mell from frosty encounters,
thaw’s confusing embrace,
fumble asunder for space
in skewed plans.
The land stutters;
winds tamp them reverent.
An ancient bliss ignites
the honeyed glint in their bitter veins,
shakes them wild with colour’s cornucopia
fanning away all cowering.
Mechanics of Metamorphosis
He dies and we’re at the
edge of the world quivering —
lost in the future’s lies.
Swords drawn
we march into minds
circling, sparring.
Why snaps past most clearly,
points to the grave we’ve tended,
plot that left us whittled
fine as balsa,
conjoined at the throat
by free will’s love.
Destiny pounds
demonic on the door.
We hide
even as she slides beneath
like earth off a shovel.
Within her gravelly wrath
we embrace the why of it
while how reads from
time’s scroll, records
hands gentling boulders
from bent spines.
Poisoned, you tend me;
broken, I coddle you.
Thorns buried in our skin
shake loose then fall.
As how advances to now
palate and throat butter,
allow pristine words,
clear-cut tales of once.
Together we walk alleys,
the boulevards of place,
unearth amber’s heat,
an apothecary’s remedy:
sibyllic sorcery.
The Start of Yellow
Daylight creaks me awake,
turns my prickly pillow
as I open to your face
soft in sleep’s wise hands,
dreaming angles smooth.
Birdsong unlocks the tulips
as your leaf-green eyes
love me into morning.
The Circular Linear
Life Dream
When soft film wafts over everything,
when blood’s breath deepens
and mind hushes to heartbeats,
perhaps then
a glimmer.
You blink twice.
All the world’s a stage.
The gauze dissolves —
no trace only
the start of a question
shivering in thought’s cellar.
Again the world melts
easing you into the signs
and all the men and women merely players,
textures of observing
this reckless rendition:
printed script and curtain.
Visceral velvet or lucid transparency?
You stutter through your lines yet
lounge in the loge.
They have their exits and their entrances,
smell lilacs where none grow.
Your brow strangely atingle,
weighty air thickens.
Signals from the other round stage,
that parallel play:
equally unlikely and compelling
and one man in his time plays many parts.
Verisimilitude
in dialogue with Untitled by Gail Read
Palms bare of incense or myrrh,
I come to this holy place —
island sheathed in Precambrian stone,
sheltered by a pious congregation —
parchment birch, ghostly oak.
Beneath arched boughs I proffer
words that sour the palate,
blunt the clarity of leaves,
your promise on my throat.
Anger’s torch illuminates
the cobwebbed rooms:
a disappointed fairy tale,
its childish lexicon —
should, fair, mine.
Mine no more.
What echoes beyond this puny I —
at once fragile breath yet
towering monolith too?
Thunder menaces
but the rain dances,
it dances
and cardinals chant our story
to the trees’ greening.
Listen, listen.
Stepping Away from Then
Forgiveness is not
a ringed onion,
a pungent dispensary
for sap that slips and does not
grasp the pearl.
It is of pearl.
Pale pearl,
a teardrop of sand
within its core — the tinny, tiny
hint of maybe not.
A forgiveness of sweet
cedar, its certain grain.
You sense the lines move
from this iteration
to another allowing
torso’s slight dip,
obsidian jaw to gentle.
Fragrant pearl comforts doubt
and bitterness blows by.
At last, forgiveness.
The Seeker Ascends
in response to Fear of Falling #4 by Mary Lou Payzant
Freed of pretense the woman scales boulders
bowed above delusion’s waters:
aqua vortex twisting fact, its spoken solace.
She persists, pushes higher
until she enters the vastness —
a crimson cavern.
Crouched, hesitant,
seeking a presence,
she climbs closer.
The woman approaches the girl that she was —
dark-fringed child squinting tentatively
into the camera’s twitching eye,
palms protective on brother’s shoulders
as she kneels behind him.
Keep him safe.
Who shields her from Dante’s Minotaur,
his boozy breath knifing?
Who sees her thrash like fine hair in the wind?
All blind to her cringing.
She hides the fetid secret,
the stains his hands
leave on skin’s light.
Misty years slick the rocks,
muffle deceit.
The woman wraps the girl in embrace,
hears her speak, listens to the savagery
again and again until with bloodied lips
the child expels the beast
prowling lifetimes inside her throat
and reclaims her prepotent note.
Elevation
Rays shine truer above
these craggy, leaden peaks,
their snowy rivers pleating
the formidable crest.
Shoulder to shoulder they fill
miles with their antiquity —
roughly torn from earth’s flesh
before human was even thought,
shrugging off ice-worlds,
wind’s clenched teeth.
They face the sky and wait.
Down the highway along the horizon
hunkered hills (black, lava-pocked)
huddle and consider
the startling copper range
smooth beyond road’s bend.
To the north, gatherings: oblong boulders,
the giant’s hand — skewed
tan pyramids balancing
in wonder.
They face the sky and wait.
Land/scapes
for Proclaim by Carolyn Jongeward
Step onto the oracle’s orange lip,
the mandala’s thin rim,
tread marmalade-slow tasting
the spicy mosaic:
its curry, mandarin,
paprika heart cooled
cream and proper gray.
The symmetry of a cluster.
Plucked, scattered daisies
reassemble whole
within the congruity of fire and air.
Each petal is storied,
each budding dream made material
then harvested,
informing the formless interior.
Ephemeral land/scapes
bound by magnetic bonds
oscillate —
attracted yet distinct
separated by compassionate paths
beiged and silvered.
You enter at the edge,
brush the lines rushing round the compass,
their illusory haste.
Precise segments shrink, slot.
The Seeker Ascends Page 2