pretty angel
in white robes
sitting
styrofoam on
green bough
glitter
gold
tinsel
crown in
a mouth of
pins and
silver.
pretty angel
in falling
dust a
deep breath.
in
silence.
pretty angel
under
glass. wings
of steel
in clockwork
motion
arise
and
greet the sun.
February 22, 2021
the gator go
getter playing
husband and
father
old sage from
a twenty-year
old scars and
broken bones and
arthritis and
those beautiful
deep set brown
eyes when he says
i don't know if
they love me
and my heart
breaks in my
old ugly narrow
chest because
i can't make it
right,
because
i can't make him
see
the grace of his
words and his actions,
the power he has
to comfort, to
be an example, to
sacrifice, to
step up as a
husband, a
father,
blindly
to be a man in
an era of
exploited
manhood.
i can honor
him only
by listening.
i can honor
him only by
remembering.
February 22, 2021
dancing bear wants your eyes she whirls in her tutu on her tip toes her cheeks full between teeth half-lidded gaze mesmerizes look, look the entertainer the sooth- sayer the giddy girl the priestess the princess shake, shake lips split spilt never ending flow fills the sound of a voice a caress a cascade of never ending spin, spin look, don't look, don't look away your eyes she needs they can't fill the void.
February 22, 2021
friends become strangers at a party with booze and weed and unfamiliar laughter and thirty years of dust trembles over a shallow grave as a yawning mouth swallows a scream without air to speak only sixteen years old now with no blood under her nails on the carpet beige carpet clumps of hair and glister of saliva I sat for so long I say goodbye to friends who are strangers and walk home alone for another thirty years.
October 5, 2020
Moita dwells in the waste. Her mother calls it a place without value, where no soul finds rest, where the gods never walk. Moita walks there and does not believe, in her child’s heart, that the gods would forsake so rich a land. She has seen fish in the muddy springs and wolf tracks in the sere featherlands. Her we’ma tells her that the wolves no longer live there, that they fed so well on the northern children that they sank from their weight into the earth. Moita does not believe this. She believes the wolves stay hidden, like the fish in the mud, and that when the tracks of the wood hens are no longer seen there, they will rise once more to feast.
Moita brings home the fruit of her labors. Smooth pebbles and twisted branches, shards of coal, and desert flowers. Her mother has no names for these things. She says their people have not long dwelt there and so do not know what the gods might have called them. Moita tells her mother that she has named a thing, a purple spike of leaves, and calls it ‘the bruised hand.’ Her mother says it is a good name. The words sink deeply into Moita. She returns to the waste, and though the gods no longer walk there, she has found their call inside her and will name everything she sees.
The creek bed is eggshell blue and becomes ‘the sky underfoot.’ The rock that casts a shadow over the stunted trees is ‘the place never lost.’ The trees are bristle tongue, black leaf, four fingers, yellow wanderer, sleeping child. She names them all, and brings the knowledge of each one back to the ears of her mother and her we’ma, though they never set foot into the waste. If the gods cannot come to the world, she thinks, she will bring the knowledge of the world to the gods.
One day a man came. He was not a god, but a southerner. The ones her ma and we’ma called ‘too goods,’ with greased hair and a pinched nose. Moita had seen them before, across the marketplace, but never at her house. He did not kneel upon the hearth rug, as her neighbors did, and he did not whisper the name of the undergod before he spoke. His words were thin, like birdsong, and she could not understand him. Her mother didn’t speak, only her we’ma, and both stood with arms folded over their stomachs, a rude gesture Moita had been warned many times not to make. Moita wanted to offer him a slice of mutton, but her we’ma lifted a hand to stall her, just two fingers, and the man did not notice.
They left the waste behind soon after. Before the harvest, before the rains, before their neighbor had her baby. Moita did not want to leave. She wanted to stay, to see the fish emerge from their long sleep, to see the wolves return. Her we’ma told her that this was not their land, that it had never been their land. Her mother said nothing. She took the rug and the fire tools, but left behind the shaved wood and the boiling pot, and the boards that made up their bed. We shall leave them for the next family, her we’ma said, we shall leave them to the gods.
Moita left too her weaving stand, and some of her carving stones. We should be generous, her we’ma said, and Moita was generous. But she went into the waste one last time. She went into the wood and through the blue-shelled course of the stream bed, and to the sounding rock, and the place where the purple leaves grew. And she took with her their names.
2015
I met a girl with lips like bubble gum, pink and puffy. I wanted to kiss them, but she wasn’t real. She was a Wash-Rite Girl, those full lips moving only in sync with the canned instructions on the machine. “Not too much soap,” she said and didn’t say. “Not too much water,” she said, though there wasn’t any water. Just soda grit, like beach sand. Soft and white. Powdered water.
I was on leave. Seven days, local. Sleepless nights every four hours, round and round a beetling orange sun. I didn’t know the girl had a name. She wasn’t real, but they called her Hum. Her body was flawless, like an enameled tooth, but her voxbox had been punctured by an errant clothes-hook and it lent a deep throb to her voice. “Not tuuuu much water,” she tried to say. “Not tuuuu much soap.”
I liked the sound of it. I stayed after my laundry came out of her machine. I paid for a hot fold and a scent like corroded iron, some local specialty. It cost me a day’s wages, but I heard her voice twice more, watched those lips move in their prerecorded paths, new words I’d never seen them shape before. “Pleeease pre-pay,” they said (or was it “Please look away.”). They said “Don’t look at me.” They said “Come back,” or “Wait for me.”
I spent seven months underwater. Local. I don’t know how to do the conversion anymore. We forget, sometimes. It’s in my record anyhow. I don’t even need to know how old I am. Sometimes I forget that too. I’m a certified 150-BB, which means I can operate a cell-crane in full darkness, without backup, and can be alone for super-extended hours. My compensation is 2nd tier, but I have no home — permanent transient status — and the forced leave gets tedious. After seven months I had laundry to do.
Hum didn’t wait for me. She was gone when I surfaced. The Wash-Rite was gone. The A-block that housed it, too. A reorg had come through, efficiently smoothing away what could be better accomplished elsewhere. The ocean would be pumped out next. The new gravity inverters had already made my job obsolete. It was another new age, a political transition that transcended politics. That’s what they said in the office as they cut the link-line in my sub-dermal. You’re free to go, they said.
I went to find Hum.
It was the voice I was looking for, not the girl. She never existed. She was pink lips and a few lines of an algorithm initiated at the turn of the century. Too much soap in a world without soap. Too much water in a world without water. Only the voice remained. Haunting my sleepless hours, whispering down the severed end of the link-line, a ghost throbbing along my own vocal cords, as if without Hum herself they would speak through me.
I was decertified. I took a job at a reconciliation depot, reprogramming data-miners who were no longer needed. Some became terminals, happily coaxing wave fields into visual media. Others were terminal, and ended their unhappy lives in a medium of chlora-gel and dissolvent. Hum wasn’t one of these, and I never heard her voice in their voices. I never heard it again.
July 15, 2015
two caged birds. and i wanted to ask you how were the dogs? and you told me a woman came to clean your house and so i was replaced. (i never could abide birds.)
December 24, 2017
it happened the first time i saw you in the rain beneath the terror of thunder and the unknown. your smile as bright and broad as warm and welcoming as a secret sunrise.
December 22, 2017
bran meal donuts like inflatable rafts taste better with frosting
2015
i cannot help you she says and holds up a hand like a wall. a wall between me and you. between what was and what will be. between the past and the future. between the pain and what I must do. i stand for a moment, suspended. my bags clutched in my hands, what little i could take with me of what had been, what could never be again. severed. split. undone. i tremble. unable to breathe. i cannot help you she says. i turn away. frantic. between one flight and another. i run.
2015
Air is free, sound is free, words are free. To believe otherwise is to be enslaved.