I meant to leave in the morning, but now trees effloresce from bedposts, soughing silhouettes on walls.
Secrets coil ‘round me in thorny bramble. The wolf waits, teeth bared, next to my packed suitcase.
Stealthily you materialize; night incandescent with your yellow moon eyes. “Don’t tell,” you pant, paw on my chest, breath moist and hot against my ear.
My body is bone cold.
I’ve never told.
I pretend the forest hides my hands, my mouth, the missing pieces you stole from me. I lie still as an alabaster tomb in the womb of the forest.
You slink away as you came, fur limned in dawn. Wildwood recedes in strands of anemic light.
I reach for my suitcase under the bed, but your teeth are still there.
Mapping the Long Haul
My body is a foreign land. In the neuronal forest I need a map to find my mislaid memories. Hands shake; muscles fibrillate out of tune. I wander a faulty electronic brume, eyes hooded like a bird of prey, anxious for the falconer to restore remembered flight. Sight is illusive. No lift of wings, no songlines in the outback to navigate the wound that never heals.
Lungs crackle like tin foil. A thousand swallows will not dislodge the obstacle in my throat: the irascible cough. Fire gnaws my skin. Ice prickles. I am molting feathers on the wind, tilting from my axis; sun too bright, flight stunted. The egg I carry falls, smashes on the rocks like snow. I am falling, too.
Hope is a destination. I hold fast to its teat as if it were a compass pointing east to a land of milk and honey where sails billow on vessels of blood. Spasms are waves; every joint bruised, aches. I am weary of this journey I was not prepared to take. Tongue swells, gums bleed, sores mock speech. If only I could choose the words I speak, but electric footsteps falter. And now another insult: my hair falls out in handfuls.
I need a map to find my way, but Long Haul Covid is a maiden voyage, fraught with terrors of the deep. I dare not sleep.
The world no longer navigable, I am my own cartographer. I mark the clotted terrain, tenderly undo knots and kinks, yearning for relief. I hear the fog horn calling — or is it ringing in my ears? I am too far away.
Bio: Gayle J. Greenlea is a poet and counselor for survivors of sexual and gender-related violence. Her poem, “Wonderland”, received the Australian Poetry Prod Award in 2011. She shortlisted and longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize in 2013, and debuted her first novel, Zero Gravity, at the KGB Literary Bar in Manhattan in 2016. Her work appears in St. Julian Press, Rebelle Society, A Time to Speak, Headline Poetry and Press, The Wombwell Rainbow, and Life in Quarantine (Stanford).
Bio: Gayle J. Greenlea is a poet and counselor for survivors of sexual and gender-related violence. Her poem, “Wonderland”, received the Australian Poetry Prod Award in 2011. She shortlisted and longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize in 2013, and debuted her first novel, Zero Gravity, at the KGB Literary Bar in Manhattan in 2016. Her work appears in St. Julian Press, Rebelle Society, A Time to Speak, Headline Poetry and Press, The Wombwell Rainbow, and Life in Quarantine (Stanford).
Homestead
There are ghosts here. They breathe
in unseen spaces behind walls,
under floorboards, in shafts of light
filtered through dust motes. At night
they drift into fields where once they
put shoulders to the plow and tended
cotton. Their shape, if you could see
them, is amorphous as cotton fruit,
diaphanous as gossamer with glints
of light like fireflies. They are more lonely
than scary, tethered to the windowless
homestead with wind-sanded fieldstone
and peeling paint. They wait for souls
long gone, beloveds who worked the land
side by side, peeled potatoes for supper,
sighed as they tucked children into bed
to cicada lullabies, rubbed salves
and embrocations into cuts from cotton
bracts and aching muscles, smiled
through wavering firelight before making
love under a diamond sky. Now fields
overgrown with weeds hide once furrowed
earth, sculpted by generations through life,
death and birth; a claim on humanity,
still longed for. Memory anchors them.
The Old Homestead by Mj Saucer
originally posted in Paul Brookes’ Ekphrastic Challenge in The Wombwell Rainbow
The Night Tree
The night tree with grizzled bark, roots milked dry by suckling humans; starved of dignity, the arc of history bends toward justice, dimmed. Scars limned in moonlight, memorialize strange fruit, harvested from branches weary from farewelling souls of dark-skinned men, more worthy than murderous landowners.
Cities and rain forests burn, oceans rise. Will no one turn the toxic tides of extremism? Roll back the currency of white privilege to diminish and destroy wealth that belongs equally to all? Ignorance is a pall spread over creation, blocking sun, forswearing Earth’s creatures. The Night Tree foretells our fate. These branches are connected.
Night Tree by Terry Chipp
originally posted in Paul Brookes’ Ekphrastic Challenge in The Wombwell Rainbow
Moveable Feast
My privilege is not wealth, social standing or gender. My currency is the color of my skin, the “lily white” of southern women, Nordic and Celtic genes overtaking Native American. Whiteness has opened doors closed to others, opportunities denied sisters burnished by sun and melanin. I took the heaping servings I was offered from the table, but they did not satisfy my hunger. So I set places for the missing and stepped back. I cannot atone for my color, my straightness, my ease of passage in the world; but I can open my hands, my ears, my heart. My voice is not my own, alone. I am a side dish on a plate, enhancing a meal called Justice.
Fragile
We collide in a tender fugue, reeds with slender necks jostled by wind and circumstance.
Fragile beings, we rush through time as if it were of no consequence. Bumps and bruises crush
red stains into our skin; panes where air is thin and the soul breathes more visibly,
purpura witnessing where words will not. How we suffer from small wounds
inflicted unconsciously, intentional tramplings in the fields. We wield power carelessly
or not at all, watch silently as another brother goes down; a sister falls in the moonlight.
Oh, the terrible ways we fail each other, refusing to speak, allowing wind to carry our pain over the horizon in soundless
ripples until the ones with scythes come to cut our necks and leave us rootless from the land.
Fragile was originally posted in Headline Poetry & Press
Reality Fascist
No one believed the dystopia you described as you launched your inaugural obsession with crowd size, though one distinguished guest called your spiel “some weird shit”.
Who could know you hid avenging wings beneath your coat? That your gloating brimstone utterances were match-strike that would set the world alight? Now, in these Days of the Dead, wisdom
arrives late. The ashes of innocence choke breath from the lungs. Arms are drawn brother against brother, mother against son; our daughters a broken Eucharist on the altar of your ego. Your apparatchiks
screech over fields of warriors, Valkyrie come not to save souls, but to desecrate heroes. Justice seekers march as you part their waves with flash-bangs, tear-gas children, train weapons of war on the peace-
full, their blood your red carpet. You, Reality Fascist, riled by fearlessness, enraged by women who will not bend, those who take pride in the color of their skin, the old who’ve seen your kind before.
You’ve made believers of us all. The emperor stripped bare, walls himself in the palace of the people. Benevolence escapes him. He sells the furnishings to foreign kings, betrays his allies, crushes the weak, tweets while Rome
burns. We are spurned, turned out of our own houses while you pour gasoline on our wounds, rob us blind, put a “for sale” sign on our honor. Narcissus with a sharpie throwing tantrums, courting porn stars, stacking courts:
art of the steal. We see through your veil of lies the rifts you sowed. Once you told the truth — the day we sheathed you in power — you said you would destroy us. Trickster in a cheap suit, you are no match for Lady
Liberty or our own rebellious bones. Unworthy apprentice, today the people rise, armed with more than a hundred million ballots. How’s that for crowd size? We are coming for you. You’re fired.
Revolution
Hunger is a maddening mistress, fatal attraction, grave tease, more palatable than the gnawing loneliness of isolation. Who would believe a rival, small, invisible could rob so many of health and dignity? I leave my home one final time, one suitcase with a change of clothes. My wife pushes the stroller with our baby and a box of kittens. The oligarchs quarantine in castles, calculating profits over cognac, while the rest of us count costs, build tent cities, swarm streets with protests. Revolution is coming. History proves power belongs to the people. Heads will roll.
Er gaan koppen rollen (Heads will Roll), by Marcel Herms
originally posted in Paul Brookes’ Ekphrastic Challenge in The Wombwell Rainbow
I stare for hours from my window into Space, earth-gaze over milk-crust horizons of the moon.
‘Splanchnon’, the Greeks called the visceral tenderness my home inspires, fragile in a universe expanding: brilliant blue dot, curtained in auroras against a backdrop of infinity. Milky Way stars chase lights of cities waking and going to sleep; terrain of ocean, mountain, jungle, desert.
Separateness is illusion.
Precarious paper shield skies cradle our planet. In cosmic perspective, I comprehend ‘oneness’ as we travel together around our star-sun. No boundaries, no borders, a perfect sphere. Oasis at the centre of nothingness. Hope against the void.
We have one destiny. No astronaut visits the stars and comes back unchanged. Of all the views from our windows, this is the one emblazoned in modern memory.
Small planet, bravely rising from a dark abyss to strike another soutenu around the sun.
Astronaut
When I was nine, I decided to be an astronaut. Barefoot in wet grass, holding my father’s hand, listening to cricket song and squinting up at the moon, certain I could see the first man walking there, black and white like the image on TV.
I wanted to moonbounce, tether myself to a spaceship instead of Earth, feel rocket boosters fire me to another world.
Breathing the scent of honeysuckle, I sucked the nectered stamens. Floating free of gravity, I took a giant leap for humankind.
Bio: Gayle J. Greenlea is a poet and counselor for survivors of sexual and gender-related violence. Her poem, “Wonderland”, received the Australian Poetry Prod Award in 2011. She shortlisted and longlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize in 2013, and debuted her first novel, Zero Gravity, at the KGB Literary Bar in Manhattan in 2016. Her work appears in St. Julian Press, Rebelle Society, A Time to Speak, Headline Poetry and Press, The Wombwell Rainbow, and Life in Quarantine (Stanford).
Fevers of the Mind 