A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

Pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek,
this is who I am. This is my story.
It is only coincidence that I sing it
to you,
but sing, nonetheless, I do. One morning
amidst the restlessness of my top-bunk sheets
I heard a whispering and thought it might be God it was
me. My unconsciousness begging me
for nourishment, silently loudly attacking
my awareness with questions: it asked why
I neglect it. Pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek,
is this, too, why your body vibrates
when your thoughts are feelings? Because you too
have recognized feeling as thought? That that
faculty of wonder you hush about as if a
***** secret of forgotten childhood memory
is something that is as real as
the metaphysical pores of a skin you cannot touch,
but know is not some foreign, distant, effacing
thing, but is thick, is thick, thick as words
creaking like old wood in a library filled
with students who read so much ******* to get into
college but never venture forth for such skin
in the skin of those unconscious voices in the
shelves? Selves: we call them books but they breathe.
The ideas wriggle in your veins like
a worm. They block your blood yet move
your soul. The stillness of your speechlessness
is some movement in itself. So I suspect of you,
pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek.
                                                So I suspect of myself.

I do not understand how else I could have been born
without eyes which we call eyes. I cannot see
why else.
                I cannot.
                                 You cannot.

There is light over there in that darkness.
               A glimpse of it- a sliver of silver
has shocked you into your paleness. Into my
blackness. It is the same difference. A different
same.
            
Line break:

A mirror tells me things with my eyeless eyes.
My brownness ***** me into journeys with
tunnels so deep that we call them pupils.
In the distance that I gaze into I find
myself gazing into a distance I gaze into. Fathom
it. Do not. Will not will it will it will not
willed. Touching it will wilt it without touching:
this is the soul you said does not exist.
              
             It is not there. It is.

In Indiana.

Where's that? asks my blood.

In Indiana.

Over there? my finger points out the window.

No. It is.

It is. Not.

Suddenly I smell something and it is myself.
It is not Indiana or freckles or pale-skin.
I ask you where it is.
Suddenly you smell something and it is yourself.
It is not Gaborone or curly-haired or black.
You ask me where I think it is.

What the **** do we know?

…uncertainty, my friend, I see uncertainty…
there are dark times,
though light comes first…
let me see: there are happy moments
and all things seem to fall in place
and desires gain momentum
and all things seem to come to fruition…
one reaches out, and grasps at what is before
and all round
and yet things that seemed so corporeal, so physical,
they melt and unravel like phantoms,
like images in the fog…
and I see uncertainty…a darkness moves over the screen,
as say shadows over a stage…
as shadows behind a puppet-show screen…
and there are smiles, friend…there is laughter
and joy and happiness…
and days of merry-making,
and love-making and fortune….
and uncertainty…there is an image of growth
and then death…
like growth in the fields and
then night and completeness
and brownness in the lands
which were green the day before …uncertainty, I see….
…there is uncertainty… do you see it too?
or is it brightness and radiance
always and always that you see?
it is like wading into a lake
to reach those edible plants that grow
a little towards the center
still close enough to reach without a swim
and one walks on firm land
and one is nearly there;
and then the mud and soil are soft
and break below one
and one falls and struggles in the water….a sudden fall...
...a sudden uncertainty…
I see uncertainty, dear friend…
but what do you see, dear friend…?
…there is uncertainty… do you see it too?
or is it brightness and radiance
always and always that you see?

A GARLAND FOR NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2014

My Once and Only Garden

It’s no longer mine
But I pass it
Nearly every morning.
It’s untended,
Overgrown, autumned,
The camellia needs a prune,
The irises have gone;
The garden needs
A good seeing to.
A sad garden to pass
Nearly every morning.



The Chestnut Avenue

I came back to fallen chestnut
Shells, conkers, everywhere,
But the leaves are still
Thinking about falling.
No wind you see.
On other trees I pass,
The lime,the white-beam,
There’s a crinkly brownness
Scattered across the path.
So dry, no wind,
September sun.
The chestnut avenue
Has some way to go.
Wind, rain, frost perhaps
And the leaves will fall.


******* a Boat

There’s this girl,
A young woman really,
On a boat.
Not living on it yet
But plans are afoot,
Along with essential repairs.
It’s not ‘Offshore’
Like Penelope Fitzgerald’s
Boat on the Thames.
But in a quiet and placid mooring
On the River Lea instead.
I thought of sending her this book,
But it’s all about liminality,
People somewhere in between,
People who don’t belong on land or sea
. . . And the boat (eventually) sinks.


Still Waiting

We sat on the seat
Under a bower of roses
In the herb garden
And she talked in that singing
Way of talking that she does;
Such a tessitura she commands
Between the high and the low
With a falling off portamento
Glide - from the high to the low.
Her hair stills falls
Across serious freckles, auburn hair,
Gold with a touch of red
Like her mother’s only softer,
Like mine once was, and my mother’s too.
She has a slighter frame though,
and is still waiting, waiting
For a real life, a woman’s life.


Cyclamen Restored

I went away and left it
On a saucer, watered,
In a north light
Near a window sill.
Its pink flowers were *****
And nodded a little
When I moved about the room.

On my return it had drooped,
Its leaves yellowed.
There were tiny pink petals
Scattered on the floor.
I put the plant in the sink
For half an hour.
It revived,
And the next day
Seemed quite restored.


Driving South

Driving south through
Dalton, Shoreditch,
Hackney and Hoxteth,
The Hasidic community
Garnished the Sunday street.
Driving down the A10
South towards the city:
The Gleaming Gerkin,
the Walkie Talkie,
and further still,
a Misty Shard.

As a child, the buildings here
Were so much slighter
And a grimy black;
The highest then, the spires
Of Wren’s city churches.

Sundays to sing at ‘Temple’,
With lunch at the BBC,
Driving south from New Barnet
In my Great Uncle’s Morris,
Great Aunt Violet dozing in the back.


Gallery

Small but beautifully right
For her London show,
Good to see her surrounded
By tide marks from the shore,
Those neutral surfaces,
Colours of sand and stone,
Rust (of course) from the beaches
Treasured trove, metal
Waiting to become wet
And stain those marks with colour.


Ascemic Sewing

Having no semantic content
These ‘words’ appear on the back
Of a chequered cloth of leaves
Backed all black
Stitched white,
A script of a garden
Receding into
Trans-linguistical memory.


September Dreaming

Facing the morning
Above a barrier of trees,
Oaked, foxed, hardly birded,
I would  wonder while she slept
About the richness of her dreams,
Dreams she had spoken of
(Yesterday, and out of the blue)
And, for the first time, in all
These precious but frustrating
years we’d slept together,
shared together.
I had always thought her dreamless;
Too fast asleep to experience
Envisioned images,
Sounds and sensations.


Think of a Poem

She told me in a text about
Think of a Poem
On National Poetry Day
Just a week away.
That’s easy, I thought,
There’s always that poem
Safe and sure in my memory store
Once spoken nervously,
under a rose garden walk,
but there, there
for evermore . . .

Who says it’s by my desire
This separation, this living so far from you. . .


Missing Music

Today I read a poem
Called The Lute: a Rhapsody.
‘From the days of my youth
I have loved music,
So have practised it ever since,’
Says Xi Kung.

In his exquisite language
He then describes its mysterious virtues,
And all the materials from which it’s made.

How I miss my lute, its music,
And the voice that once sang to its song.


Drawing

I wonder if she’s drawn today,
And what? I wonder.
John Berger says:
Drawing goes on every day.
It is that rare thing
That gives you a chance
Of a very close identification
With something, or somebody
Who is not you.
I wonder if she’s drawn today,
And what? I wonder.

This early morning time (you do not know
- however much I share its joys)
has been a space, a time aside for me:
to be beside your bed, your sleeping head, hard
into the pillow’s soft rest, deep
among dreams of swarming fish,
the basking shark, the limpet shell,
gannets (always gannets), and the otter.
Seeing its running prints, its tell-tale spraint,
the sleek brownness, sea-sluiced washing on rocks
meters away, you told me the wonder at it all,
your voice sparkling as the sun-glinting sea sparkles.
 
And I am free for once to share your time aside.
Sore and poor, the relentlessness of making
stops. I am chair-bound.
The radio, my books, your dear letters lie beside
the drugs and flowers on this small table where I write.
There is time to think beyond the next bar and the next.
There is time to contemplate the thrill and joy of you
though far away, yet brim-full of such sights that feed my soul.
 
Oh, the innocent joy of exclamation,
each rush of every description made.
The music of your observation,
so harmonious, so pure-toned,
As though the land, the sea, the sky,
wrapping around itself (and tied at your feet),
sings.
 
To share this time aside
       is the sweetest kiss,
       the tenderest touch,
       the most loving, loving look.
Know that please.
Know what happiness
you’ve brought to me
and bring.

the brownness of my skin
should not be the basis
for the deafness in your ears
to ignore the shouts
for you to move

take action

the brownness of my skin
should not be the basis
for the blindness in your eyes
to ignore the ignorance
for you to see

take action

the brownness of my skin
should not be the basis
for the blandness of your tongue
to refuse the opportunities
for you to taste

take action
for
the color of the hands
passing the plate
shouldn't matter
when you’re starving
for change.

***** with brownness that I can't wash away.
Born into a filth that made me unhygienic before my feet could touch the ground
Before my hands could grasp objects other than my mothers hand or chest or face
Guilty before the gavel was struck
Before the cell was locked
Before the siren rang off
Guilty of brownness that is not innocent until proven guilty
Rather brown until proven worthy
Brown until the grave
assigned to us before we have a chance to see the world and become who we're suppose to be
Graves are becoming just as crowded as those ships they brought us here in
Stuffed and cramped like the cells they keep us in
Piling bodies on bodies while blood cells fill the avenues we march in
Graves over crowded
Hearts over hurt
Innocent with a guilt I can't wash away.
Our mothers can't hold us now.

And oh I ache, like a creaking door, like a rusty faucet pipe. I can hear all the blood running it's errands in the sides of my head, it's this bathroom, this ******* bathroom. I feel like the turning handle on a mall gumball machine, no, then I feel like the ******* gumball, and I fall to the little black crevice with door, and you roll me out and pop me into your mouth, chewing hard and your spit is turning blue and I'm getting softer and softer in your lips. A caged Ocelot, and all I have to look to for a golden tomorrow is the poster of all the colorful wildlife, advertising this sickness. This pinging on a metal ceiling. This brownness. But my posters are of a different pair of devastating blue eyes that I know are evil too, but I pacify myself with the thought that they are so light because they are pure and clear, not because they are cold and hard. I started crying in my sleep. And I wake up with the streetlight shining through the window from that ***** alley that I love, and my face is so wet and so pink, and I say it's better that I cry unknowingly than consciously. I beg and toss for migration and distraction, chaos, oh baby where did you go? You can't leave me here with loose pieces of skin and a sick heart. You can't pick off the bottles on the ledge one by one with a rubber band and some pebbles and leave me with nothing. All I've got left are some nail polish bottles, some concert tickets, a few empty backseats. Things are either so incredible and hopeful or so *****, filthy, like gas stations, like the inside of ovens, and my fingers are becoming calloused. I'm floating like a cherry in a ***** shirley. Oh come, with your fingers in my hair, and kiss me.

Splashed into boiling water
Swirled on a spoon
Milk makes clouds in brownness
A splodge makes a moon

The spoon stirring causes chaos
Man watches and waits
For the cooling and the stillness
Of this drink of the greats

I.

Sickly, dark-skinned Joseph
Bustos was in a suit,
picked his phone from his
Pocket and asked us to take
Him a selfie as he motioned
To the statue of an eerily staring,
Possibly demonic Ronald
McDonald languidly swaying
On a faux-park bench. Collective

Laughter - "Are you serious,
"Man?" We said, having all heard
Full well stories of
****** painted clown statues
Moving its creaky bones
At the crack of dawn only
To devour our soul. "Are
"You serious,
"Bustos?" we genuinely taunted -
"Well I'll have a mirror," he told us
"So don't worry." I never

Quite got what that meant.

II.

The laughter and tales of
Business school and
Med school continued full on
Into the late (school) night,
Dense tails of superglued
Frog brains, Chinese economics,
Girl problems in the
Philippine stock exchange drowning
The macabre absurdity
Of the take out
Terror, Ronald

Staring blankly into the crevasse of
The night, and we absurd,
Blanketing in laughter scarred and scared
Wanting to approach
The chained playground but shivering
At the slightest hints
Of movement - which of

Course

Came. And Jack
Yeung (The largest, yellowest
Of us all, perhaps smartest too,
Studying in Hong Kong)
Leapt, at which we laughed,
And made jokes about how
The cockroaches
Matched the color of
Our country's skin, made it
Crawl not just because
Of its stick thin haunches,
But its brownness,
Seediness, inconcealable

III.

To which we laughed - yellowed
Out, almost as pale
As the sticky ice
Cream cups that adorned our
Table, pale not though,

From lineage but rather
The collective rosiness of our
Disillusioned, ice
Cream-fed cheeks, and the fear
Of darkness, and eerie
Whitefaced Ronald, and
Brown cockroaches and

Spirits that could move
Frozen marble faces. Bustos
Gestured quietly
To his cellphone,
Gazed downward and muttered
Something about
Fraternities and connections.

IV.

Behind our mutterings,
The Movement: children,

Coffee-stained and tattered rag
Shorts slit open like grass stained
Skirts, holding their bony
Hands and kissing Ronald's
Hollowed cheeks like he was
An ancient god. "Stop,"
I imagine us warning them,
"Evil spirits, dark and deep
"As night itself, haunt his body.
"Stay away - we've studied
"His countenance plenty."

They would only laugh though,
And continue to stroke
His paint-chipped cheek,
Brown - not
Ghost-thinned cockroach,
But rather rich
Like brewing coffee and
Fertile

Soil.

I was born with the biggest eye sockets the nurses had ever seen, but unfortunately my eyelids weren't even
Because of genetics, or from a Hispanic superstition my mother told me, I have uneven eyelids that make me take pictures with my left side because society told me to find my good side since my whole face wasn't good enough
Wasn't pleasing enough
or wasn't beautiful enough
That lasted about the first 11 years of my life
Then I met a boy in California who said my eyes were so big and so brown that my eyelashes reminded him of spider legs because of all the coats of mascara and black eyeliner I used to compensate for the lack of evenness, and how the color of my eyes reminded him of brown sugar cookies his grandma use to make him when he was sad
That's when I fell in love with myself
In love with the fact that my eyes were described to be the size of the moon with or without make up
How the brownness in them turned darker with rage,  jade when calm, and a honeysuckle color when in love
I fell in love with the way my eyelashes touched my eyebrows on a daily bases
And even whenever I cry, I still love the way my eyes can tell someone how I feel better than words do
To this day I don't know what that boys name was, but I thank him
For reminding me that my faults, even the slightest ones make me unique
make me beautiful

on Friday, a tour of the abattoir,
one with meat hooks so shiny that people's pupils were captured,
and the brownness of the blood river
made the orphans weep.

such a miserable place
your shoes got taken
and your socks soaked up the meat juices,
I got sent home with my eyeballs in a plastic bag.

we all got a complimentary abattoir coffee,
and you were the only one
who didn't drink it.

"there are dust particles in here," you said
"I think there are pieces of gristle, or rib cages"
but no one was listening
their ears were just diamonds
sparkling in meat hooks
the abattoir tour.

1

         do you remember the first death?

unlooked for
     when we are
unprepared, have no reason to wonder
what death will mean to anyone
         and the gripping power of grief

(or, the guilt, if you have no particular
              feelings of grief, at all)

2

         and the spring rain

as it washes the brownness of winter
     from the yard and into
the street, the gutter running with
          snow melt
the boys plugging the storm sewer
to make a pond in the dead end circle

          where they still play

MESSAGE GOES HERE
     BE BRIEF

Do your thoughts have limbs strong enough to choke you?
     THERE ARE ARMS HERE –STOP- THOUSANDS –STOP-

Can I see fragments fester in your dilated pupils?
      MY EYELIDS HAVE GROWN THICKER OVER TIME –STOP-
      CAPILLARIES ONCE BRANCHING OUT FROM LASHES HAVE ERODED –STOP-
      INDEPENDENT RUMINATIONS HAVE BEEN CARFULLY CONTAINED –STOP-

Then, at what point do your ‘ruminations’ make you colorblind?
      NOW –STOP-
      I WILL PAINT MYSELF BLUE TODAY –STOP- AT LEAST I THINK SO –STOP-
      I FIGURE LACERATIONS WILL LOOK NICE IN PURPLE –STOP-

After they bring brownness, are you fit enough to die?
      WITH LOVE
      –STOP-

I love your mouth
How golden brown it looks
How sunlight inspires it to move

I think you've inspired me to believe in something as cryptic as love
Love without complication
Love that accepts my limitations
As little tiny grains of sand
That makes me your girl to love
Your best friend
To visit
Without hesitation.

The kind of life
Where one set of phones
Are left baking in the car
And two sets of feet
Are being lifted in the air
Swinging with the cling of the hammock
Laughing as he moves us
With his diligent set of hands
And his ability to make this easy

Because from my observation

This was never supposed to be easy
The getting along forever
And staying together
I was always supposed to be restless and complicated and confused
To what made me soar
But it's so easy

To watch the golden brownness of your mouth
Move
Like you're swallowing the clouds
Like each sigh you muster
Has become the wind
On a hammock
That has turned to sunlight

hard as a feather
capture the weather
polarities are kindred souls
i long to hold you close to my *****
and assume the unassuming
is all you have need for

our hands are hourglasses
broken on the seashore
sand has spilled out like rice
justified by time
another victim of the sublime
i miss her kindred spirit
although happiness and density
weighed heavy upon my soul
i chose to wait for comfort and shallow tide to control
the outcome of this poem
is like an ancient story
where the gods are getting hungry so they eat their own
brownness

forgotten
in fields of rotten tyrants
and brooms
sweep the countryside
like fire
burning through streets
tearing down the feasts of dionysus, bacchus, and eurypides
orpheus’ daughters
sold all of their water
to the maitre d’s and hostesses
so your own emotions could rent rooms in their vacant hallways

i saw all your warnings
and yet i chose to run right through them and into your arms
accept this token of my heart
a piece of fabric torn from sober wisdom
and spun with threads of copper
it becomes a blanket
and wraps your fragile nakedness
as the corn and leaves used to do

forgetful one
please heed this
your memory is naked
respect the unexpected
your lies are being collected and written on papyrus
sirens are awakened by your cries in the wasted light of the moon
perhaps we still must make amends
say amen
and sweat
your swathing blanket
your **** angels
swear by their creator
saying: do yourself a favor and let me enter you

Numbers can't count the number of times
I look back to see if you are behind.
Words can’t word the love I have for you
can’t you see it in my eyes?
I must be a great success,
as I rise amidst my defeat to impress you.
Only if you looked at me with those caffeine intoxicated eyes,
only if you had shown the brownness of love,
I’d have been in love with you just the same,
Or maybe a bit more...

a black boi/girl prays that they aren’t so black and blue in the new year,
they write the manifestation and burn it over orange blue flames.
in the evening, blue-black girl’s stomach is swollen with wine,
they sit  and think of the blue-black boi with the heavy eyelids
and the dark Pisces eyes they have been dreaming of drowning in.
day-dreaming of the warmth of their breath, short of breath,
warm mouths, shared cold showers between the two of them.

we get our start in liquid – do you remember the states of matter?
     solidliquidgasplasma
drowning in you sounds like a game of memory,
a nostalgia for beginnings, the dreams of a fontanelle filled with memories yet to already become, a yearning for something that has yet to have happen
a futurity encapsulated somewhere inside of our dna.
I want to drown in her brownness and let it saturate my
     lungsmouthnoseears.
I want to taste you on my lips when I first wake. like you fill my every inch. I want your essence to effuse from my pores, to feel like my teeth are still at your ear.

do you remember when we first found each other? my heart broke from the levees and you opened your arms. you felt like the warm stillness before the storm. you remind me of the way that the summer time humidity hangs in the air.
i’m not suffocating in it, i’m drowning.

I.
Come hither soon sweet yellow ball of spring
With honey dipped and blazoned slow by subtle fire
To this our porch of winter dour
So laced in white and tied by frost

With bounces quick and deftly turned  
With your first touch from feathered flight
Pray, brew this cold
To spring’s own sweetened mead


II.

Smash well that bloat of frozen drift
And melt it into crooked runs
Like mountain streams reduced to flow
Away along the curbing

Lay low the lengthy strings of ice
And turn them into fresh warm drip
And bid new sprouts to split the brownness
Of their ceiling

III.

And as you bounce
Strum lightly on your warm and flowing breezes
And so the gentle music play that heeds us of
Your coming

IV.

So soon… Oh Spring!
In lightness fed
In greens to live for months this time
We may bloom in rapture’s rise
And loose these blocks of numbness
That harshly choked our move and flow
And seal our days with light and heat
And sweet passion’s move return

Brandy in my blood,
thoughts riding across
the pink plain of my hand.
M Street confessions
come cheap this time
of year, when
cherry flowers tint
the air with their
exploding heads.

Her version of me
seems better than mine -
I'm always out in the distance
selling rain back to the clouds.
Spring's coarse branch
clubs the brownness
of my unspooling eye.

Is she second-guessing?
Who can blame her?
I have burned all
my wild dreams
into flakes and cinders.
My art is hungry,
a nest of grinding teeth.

She could not abide the
accolades.  Every syllable
scratch and poked through
her.  Layer after layer the
thorns of praise tore her

until one day she stowed
stones in her pockets.
She walked along the
side of the water, not
thinking now, not even
the recitation of reasons.

Thousands of words
behind her and she
did not think they
mattered.  She walked
along the bank and
gathered pieces of
granite.  She hoarded
these like treasures

until she had enough.
The first step was
cold but unnoticed.

She walked into her
death like a nun who
no longer feared the
confessional.

Her hair floated around her
like seaweed, fingers
like fish.  She stopped
the flowers of language

until there were no
more petals.  She died
consumed by a
brownness welcomed
after the lighthouse
darkened.

Mrs Dalloway
never gladly held
another day.


Caroline Shank

I see your disgust of my blood, your savage thoughts
making my stomach crawl within, making me feel like
I could regurgitate slimy rhymes, drunken songs,
damaged verbs gone wrong, my tongue numb,
my lips a flaming volcano erupting blazed bullets
and tear gas, almost passing out as I cried out in agony.  
I realize the destruction that has been subjected upon me
by your perilous existence, your loathsome lyrics so bitter
cold and swollen, a crashing wave of smashed beats
screaming in my ears as I felt like I was becoming paralyzed
by your poisonous design.  I was inanimate, irrelevant,
a backspaced paragraph deleted and depleted, suffering
from your distaste of the rich brownness running through my face.

Was there ever a day when childhood could bloom?
Overalls, converse and a dewy abandoned lot
I wished to be a free child, wild and with whimsy
The sun just below the horizon
the friendliness of darkness pouring in gently
hair that's escaped the braids that couldn't contain it
and the brownness of the earth on my palms
I dreamt of this childhood as I sat mercilessly through church
Contained, silenced and controlled
There was no childhood for me
No freedom, space or whimsy
I never greeted the evening or the friendly dark
and my hair was always bound by rubber bands and barretts
the palms of my hands carried no traces of brown except that of my own skin
And church was simply a prison and my soul began its longing
for the day when childhood could bloom