photo by Adrien Wodey (unsplash)
facing away
Opening the kitchen, grill at my back, spiders lit up, blue all around, onions sweating, the line cook and dishwasher singing along with corridos on the radio voices straining at everything the song contains, even I, cold ass bitch of the line, felt something soaring before getting back to blade, transforming flesh into sustenance, as if all our comforts weren't stuffed with blood and bone, songs of love and the unbroken, we gather words from the waters, it is the making that sustains, the smallest flowering passed hand to hand, plate to plate, mouth to mouth, it is how we celebrate survival, untaste the blood, scar fading into age, word lifted from water, shimmering, slurring all our prayers, hands up, day lifts flame from oak, horizon dissolving into green we wrapped in our hair, it is how we endure the living, each day becoming new again, the daily repetition of discovery, relentless grappling with memory, making anew the first breath of waking, sun from a high window, paper nightgown, mattress on the floor left hand cupping a hollow egg of singing, air thick with wing, feather and flowering bone river, lamp of shell Often, unable to keep my mouth shut, spun up, summoned from within arc of wave, night still writhing upon tongue, hard shadow in my eye, yet welcomed daily by crow or egret, cormorant or spoonbill, false lightning eats life not memory, shame is momentary but recollection continues, upriver in the cypress, breathing heavy fragrance of magnolia, darkness, light the lamps, raise the blinds each new thing on the board tastes of shadow, brine, ash settles on unbroken water, what crawls into the eye an oracle of leaves, divination of yes, no there was the decade I could not eat without feeling an iron ingot settle in my guts, rusting, shank of the hook in my cheek clicking with every word often, unable to keep my mouth shut, speaking aloud to taro and banana, head high, unfurling burgundy, darker green than palmetto, we are each of us a sail of verdure, windblown under azure unyielding, each of us, unspoken the obligations of the past made today settle into sediment, time and pressure solidify the stone in the eye, stained hands flutter a voiceless semaphore, dismantling what made us is only choice still available, a necessity of tide, often, unable to keep my mouth shut I make things worse, rust in my teeth, ash in my hands, coins on my eyes, night still writhing, we make that the shards be unsplintered, candle awakening to match, that the voice beyond the creek be heard, wave breaking shore never approached empty-handed, tongue on the eye of the hook, unblinking in this thin air 1) of seven memory rides the tongue, cast iron, brittle, obsidian slick, taste the roundness, feel the heft, the heart of a star quenched in bacon fat, licked clean by household ghosts, memory rides the tongue, sand filled jars with shells, still singing of sea, when the moths found me, powdering face and wrists with scales of wind, night dipping stars from a cauldron, the roof of my mouth is torn from chewing hard words left on the table, a shard of Moon buried in my left hand, tongue of despair slithers in one ear, we gather up broken light from a heavier gravity, there was a song at midday after lightning furrowed bark, smoke spiralling across palmetto, the lightness of owls, drowsed by the slow breeze, we paused in shade, skillet over coals, a smoking altar, mirror of prophecies, rendering down or frying up, the circumference of squeal, onions, garlic, olive oil, peppers, the verdant world centers on your beautiful darkness, as the hearth opens itself, flame a fluid glyph, all our names have burned here, beneath the spider, disk of transformation, we sleep in ash of our own consumption, we sing of smoke, we sing of remembrance, of the flame in the hand. First morning of birdsong Holding vigil with Moon, not in the quiet of rooms but striding down a road of sand and oyster shell, ibis pale in moonlight, bearing witness to what smoke rises from pines, from the hollow no mouth will fill, how fever burned out the framework of the house, bones collapsing into cinder, how the heart was cut from a different cloth, shroud of burlap, sail of flour sack, how memory was a conch dragging shell through grass flats, burying itself beneath a blanket of tide, most muscular tongue of all our singing. My voice is not my own, a creature of river, long and slow, hauled out basking or hanging eye deep in the current, watching over her eggs, shadow of black water sinuous amongst cypress and flag, oaks leaning over their reflections, ribbon of blue that could be sky, tattered lace of cloud heavy with thunder, there is no flowering in these hands, worn to the vestigial twigs of thicket, tangled in dewberry, thorn combed coat of fox, still and watching, blinking against mosquitoes, concealed from coyote and some man promising reconversion. Unpronounceable shards of shells washed up out of depth of barrel sponges, hogfish, grouper, cold current coiled flowing through sea fans, in its fullness, unbroken, there is no reply to Moon, lightning does not coagulate into word, burnished triton, scallop or cockle, sometimes iridescent as pen shell, sea contains all things, except star, sun or wing lifting wind of pelican, every destination folded into wave, all that remained unsaid polished translucent, thin lip of vanishing, sky splintering spall of light dropping into the sea, slowly, flexing our knees, we shoulder the weight of silences we cannot redeem, burden of dust, bushel of ash, absent moon still filling our eyes. Tupelo flowering, dark river As memories unspool into a continuous loop, a notation of intimacies, glyphs carved into breath of form, swallowing word of tree at edge of black water, languid as cottonmouth, lithe as wind pressing through tupelo, cypress, twisting limbs, shaking loose oak leaves, he said he could unfold the wafer of silence stuck on the back of my tongue, in the craw, stretching open every word, reaching into every breathless place, what replaced silence, respiration of another, it was all true, what he said, "if you weren't that girl, you'd never have been on the back of my bike". This form vibrates at a frequency of wing and leg, road spun out beyond, beyond again, the body you refer to could be river or sea, even karst, writhed through with erosion, pills dissolving galleries opening to aquifer, turning hand to hand, tongue is the wave, sand flowing, darkness uncontained, I have always been of shadow, made briefly flesh, an emulsion of oil and acid, lemon sky simmering, once he said, " ibis are an angle between light and form, this one liquid, that one whelk", the tree drips fat, unctuous gobbets of sap, pine shouldering salt wind, thick with midges, mosquitoes, "to love this place is to love your own suffering", the same man said, "forget the river, blacking out is a similar swim" discarding trust, resolute breath as room surfaces into focus, some thing flutters in honeysuckle on window, ceiling fan thwacks thick air into manageable chunks of breath, the man kneels over me, "that was awesome, sugar, let's do another." When you step out of the tree, surface rushing up as body strikes current in a boil of air, amber bubbling through black water, the form shifts, alligator, catfish, fae, a vibration cicada matches, a sound of cuttings opening up in pines on the road south, he demanded fare at every rest area, " mileage is eating you up, sugar, but the destination completes ." We unfurl the shade, sprung upon arc and strut, sewn from a soft textile, not word, not song, not light, in all its textures, not rain, this deluge comes without cloud or lightning, this river rises, year after year coming to full flood, we watch from beneath our parasols as all the upcountry is swept out to sea, emptiness tangled, a chorus of gulls, still I feel his hand within me, a weight of bone and word, a fragrant column of moonflowers on the dead pine. Super Deluxe Poetry Showcase re-post on Peach Delphine including a Quick-9 Interview (2021)
Fevers of the Mind 