Magdalena

Maggie, short for Magdalena,
strolls away from me with an orange in her hand,
sticky from the grub of the day.

The earth moves for Maggie.
How could it not?
Around her there must be some mystical shield,
an angel, maybe, or a protective spell.
I imagine the heavens holding a council meeting
to discuss bringing the mountain to Maggie.

And she drinks of it with ferocious thirst.
Maggie grabs the world by its scruff
but then with worshiping hands, cradles it.
And the world, it cradles her back.

She's got some umbrella against the clattering,
the jostling, the pianos that fall from the seventh story.

I, too, move for Magdalena.
I call her by her given name and will the asteroids to strike elsewhere.

Double Dactyl

Miracle thunderstruck
Fencepost a money drop
Fun with a porpoise
Is nodding my head

Ballet shoe miracle
Thunderstruck nodding is
Brontosaur crawling
Its tar-pitted bed

Orange cone Superdome
Purposeful beau soleil
Things I can dream about
One at a time

New shoes and brontosaur
Give me a moment here
Breathing hard into my
First gin and lime

From Jess' Poetry Challenge

"Write a poem that begins with the phrase 'I am a love story' "

I am a love story
My opening credits are epic and my heroine, she
Is not the definitive beauty
(She cries too often, and can be
Extraordinarily self-righteous, so for true
The audience doesn’t always root for her)
And what she falls in love with is
The horizon and what
Sings her awake is
My whisper in the morning that today
Might be different

Oh, I breath her in and at the exhale
She comes out bruised, and vehemently swears off my epilogue
But I never believe her because time
And again she delves,
Waltzing between my lines
With new hope that someone’s forever will
Coincide with hers, and
Pursues the dream with such
Vigor that it doesn’t matter
How many white crosses
She passes on the highway because
Every single time, she creates the
Most moving balcony scene you’ve ever beheld

Nobody Expects a Piano

Nobody expects a piano.

It started with a minuscule shadow on the sidewalk.
You weren't even looking for love, and then, whoosh!
There she was, charming and blonde and callipygian.

The shadow grew so much more quickly than shadows ought to grow.
We are accustomed to the evenings falling fast here.
After supper you can usually only play outside for an hour or so,
And you can watch the darkness at your feet
Lengthen from a figure of your own height into a horizontal giant.
But this was different.

She was honey-colored and melodious
(Or was that melody just the whistle,
The rush of air, falling pitch and prophetic crescendo?)
Whatever it was, you listened, transfixed.
You loved her, no reservations,
Not even three in the afternoon, and nobody expected it.

You stared at the ground
At that sliver of black, expanding like the universe
(Except that this time the bang came afterward.)
The note in your hands read,
"I am flying to Prague or driving to New Mexico.
It doesn't matter which.
Goodbye."
And that was all.

You never saw it coming; she had seemed so happy.
It came from a window on the seventh story,
And you stood as the shadow grew at your feet,
Soon over your feet and knees and then,

It happened faster than anybody could have guessed.
The piano landed squarely on your head with a great smash.
We ran towards you, tripping over b-flat minors strewn on the sidewalk,
And for half a minute thereafter, we could hear
The percussive jangling of splayed keys, hammers, and strings.

tapping toes

I seem to be slacking. Poems are humming just under my surface but I can't seem to hear them. Yet.

Have patience.

Icarus and the Timebird

When will I be magic?
I pounce, thrash, punch the air.
No refined sugar suffices.

I climb up and up,
Flaring my ire at the staircase. This is how I have to travel now.
I settle for spitting from the roof of the Shaw building.

I miss those wings. I know they were mine.
Maybe it was centuries ago, maybe it was another life.
But at some point I had them.
I have dreams of thermals and tailwinds
And always wake with knotted shoulders.

I am jealous now.
They were mine.

I glare at the clockworks, its sad, sad chiming.
At noon I was a clever prison break.
At three there was hot wax dribbling over my ribs.
I plunged into the ocean, no fins, no gills.

The irresistible sky beckons, scolds,
As though I could will my vertebrae to open into pinions by thinking,
Transform, transform.
Hollow out my bones and float backwards in time.
Believe me, I would.

Atop the Shaw building
I spy on scuttling people, haunt the rafters
And wait for the time to spring up
Into the ozone.

Masters of the Universes

So

I found a program, when I was
full-of-despairfully
prowling the interwebs

thinking about my f-word
that being
not fuck

which is a delightfully useful
and often attention-grabbing
and perfectly fitting for many situations sort of word

but the other f-word

which I suppose I'll have to say now
since I've taken
all the other
side roads
I
could think

of

stopstallingstopstalling deepbreathandokayhereitis

Future.

I found this thing
while thinking
I love women and stories. That's what I love and what I want to learn about.
Why the fuck
-see there's that puddlewonderful word again-
can't I just get an advanced sort of degree in women and stories?
Blessed be (and also cursed?) the inventor of Google.

Because now I am full steam ahead
roadtrip planning statement writing recommendation scrounging relief sighing
into

wait for it



a little little little place in the northern bit of tennessee
will spit me out in two and a half or so years
with a Masters of Storytelling.

What?

Yes.

Little Orison

"Solder two wires together, somebody else"



Little Orison

Mary, oh Mary,
They tell me you listen.
They tell me your fabric
Is the same as mine.
And though you are clouded
In gauzy blue linen
I've heard it said
That you answer in time

Mary, oh Mary,
My hems, they are fraying
And oil and mudslides
Are staining my clothes.
Blasphemous mouths,
Nights sweating and praying,
Pastel-colored Mother,
Can you relate to those?

Mary, they tell me you listen.
Mary, they tell me you listen.

Tarnished Silver

Spoons out of raspberry strata,
Puffed with shallow scoops of breath,
Are curved and burnished until
A warped face gleams back.
Now stretched at all of her seams,
With vagrant glances upward
She says, cavalier,
"My violin's been strung so many years
I am just sick of the high notes."
So she replaces her chokecherries
With wandering jews, and lets
Her starthimbles tumble downward.

Penelope, revisited

Both the first and second times I read The Odyssey , I felt a great deal of feminist scorn for Penelope, but later changed my mind.

I want to shake you, to say
What were you thinking?

This man, he came to you reeking of carnage.
He slew the suitors who, believing him dead,
Brought you flowers.

He instructed your son
(Your son.)
To slaughter the maidens,
Some of whom had been raped,
Because they, like any decent girlfriends would have,
Told you to move on.

You waited for him all those years,
And yes, I know about these high-minded
High-fisted
Notions about honor, and the glory of killing the right people.

But did anyone tell you
How long he dallied on Calypso's island?
Did anyone tell you about Circe's bastard child?

Did they tell you how he chose a path
Through the water
That guaranteed the deaths of six of his men?
He never told them.
Just offered up their lives.

Surely, surely you must have known,
Somewhere in your woman's bones
You must have felt this violence in him.

I thought, "Stupid woman."

But then I remembered the myriad things
I was willing to forgive
In exchange for the illusion of closeness.

I excused figurative violence
And literal betrayals,
Saying, "It's just part of the journey."
I was swayed by the solidity
Of a body in front of me,
Wanted it more than I wanted
To admit the truth of what had happened.

How are we different, Penelope, you and I?
Did you call yourself weak,
Lie to your friends about who you were seeing,
And curse your own heart
When he brought his sword into your bedroom?

Penelope, forgive me. We are in the same shoes.