your soul once carried. The softest
cotton, fine grain of wood,
tiny teeth of gravel, the twisting
arms of waves or burst of flames,
will bind to your flesh
until you are no more
than broken links of carbon.
For those waiting to be identified,
heaven is a white sheet too short
to cover their feet.
International Space Station, 23 July 2014
on a photo by Alexander Gerst
Light, invisible unless it strikes
something: a wall, a tree, a sliver
of smoke, your eye. Fireworks makers
know how to make light whirl
and dance, displacing the stars
of midsummer or grip of winter.
Entranced, one can only surrender.
If you didn’t know what the bursts of light
Alexander Gerst had captured in space,
you could be forgiven for thinking
they were beautiful, like filigree
or deep sea creatures. But there,
dark waters bordered
by a scattering of lights, the beach
where four children playing
were blown up.
Crocodiles in Belfast
The morning radio reports
another crocodile attacked a woman
in Belfast. She was washing a bucket
to be filled with river water to carry
back home. Two other women armed
with buckets were around. They screamed
and clattered the hollow plastics,
swung them against the crocodile's sides
until it released the woman's leg.
Annoyed, it withdrew to a quieter
part of the river to wait in silence
for another meal. The news
will soon be forgotten
before the woman's leg heals.
But she will be going back
to the river's edge
while the drought extends its grip
on the land and the men
of the village go in search
for work elsewhere in Mpumalanga.
Women and Children First
A woman, her grip
tight as a fist, is pulling back
the hijab of another woman.
In the same frame, a boy
with rubber sandals is poised
to land a kick on her thawb.
Just look closely.
The soldiers
in the background
aren't doing anything.
Melissa Cantrell
Collision
You were always there, it seemed, at the edges,
gripping the hems of my weekend scenes.
I, the allegiant regular—
The bartenders knew my bottles,
allowed tabs. I did not bluster, or get muddy.
I left upright, with dignity and dollars in my pocket.
You flitted, sulked, and roamed all over the joint,
your orbit slushy, sequenced to a design
only you could follow.
Some nights, you plinked an entire roll of quarters into the jukebox,
sifted out some lovelies from the stacks:
Donny Hathaway if you ached.
Coltrane for storms, sorting the debris in your head.
Zeppelin or Jack White, if you wanted to brawl.
You screamed for someone to turn it up.
Swagger with a pool cue guitar.
I caught you howling in the bathroom once.
Pretended I hadn’t, and retreated.
You came out wearing lipstick the shade of an open vein
and left with your arms around a dizzy girl,
her neck spattered crimson.
You probably weren’t merciful that night.
You were discussed.
She spreads trouble.
Rowdy.
I outgrew turbulence long ago.
Tossed it furious and berserk and spitting,
a mad thing with plague in its blood.
Shirked a bursting city too gutter sharp for me
and staggered West, to unravel in peace
with the rest of the quiet folk.
So I tried to ignore you.
But you just bustled in tonight,
all yawning havoc and catastrophe,
and skid a glass next to mine,
your ante for uprooting my waveless world.
Spark
July 7th, and the fireworks loiter—
Elemental fizzles to my north,
cracking the night open
like a lover with rude hands.
Take that. Feel that.
A wallop of copper, zinc, aluminum, iron.
Most times, the chemistry gets folded up,
discarded beneath the shiver and boom.
Forgetting,
Or not caring:
We quarter the same fuels, tourists in our blood.
We’re burning up there, too.
Affliction
At the next table, intruding—
a clump of youth.
Crooked, dropped-razor hair, unfinished faces.
Kick started and roaring,
slinging wide ideas over waffles and eggs.
You drag out the usual colossal savages to debate:
Death. War. Love.
But remotely, just nibbling the corners.
Notions deprived of knowing anything so stout,
or final, as those beasts.
Ozone and poses in your mouths.
The residue left when experience withers,
and all your crowing gives out.
Something mean uncoils in me at your noise.
I want to say:
You are as significant as ortolans,
glutted with a mash of half-grown gospel.
Your end will be just as horrible,
but you won’t gnash or scrabble
when the brandy barrel locks shut.
Taken by surprise.
Compromised.
(Your ramparts were so radiant, so tough, how did they fail?
Cobbled of followers, feeds, personas—
garbage slathered in every crevice, to keep out the rain and ruin.)
Spines duped into believing
a hashtag hits harder than what’s waiting for you outside,
in the years rattling ahead.
I’ve met the slashing gods.
I’ve learned to salute lesser ones.
Those who really understand how to sink into the gray spots:
Comfort. Quiet. Rest.
The burn cures of aging.
I want to say these things.
Give warning before you tumble out of this place.
Be the sapped, seen-it-all diviner
who lurches in, rips up your rails,
alters the story before it’s too late.
Instead, I let you carry on.
(Struck feeble and flightless.)
Pay my check.
Leave you to prod giants,
already hearing your bones crunch between their teeth.
Martin Conte
Hair
Without the princess headdress,
jango jive do rag,
mother’s skull stretched bare—
spotty crust of hilltop,
tall grass are clumps of hair,
decaying under boulder.
Tufts clung where she left them
to stick from kerchief—
my Queen, my Hippolyta—
stray antennae, strands of memory.
She came downstairs uncovered once,
emerged earthworm, caught me
with eyes wide.
This mother not mine, this woman
unknown. Once,
when I was four, I learned to braid
her wai
st length cascade,
fibers of her being, feeling part—
Oh Queen, Oh Hippolyta—
of her tumorless universe.
After chemo, it grew in
gray and brittle, a brillo scrub.
She chopped it to military attention.
Now it drapes, chainmail of the knight,
clinking over shoulders, shining with frost.
My Queen, My Hippolyta:
you are dressed for battle.
Skin
Ichthyosis is a family of disorders characterized by dry or scaly and thickened skin. — NIH
When Narcissus finally disturbed the water,
out leapt a salmon, shimmered fish
to baby, human, unwieldy and foreign,
landlocked lips chapped without gills.
My body was disaster, dying faster
day by day. I was no miracle
no flower petals here, just
suicidal sandpaper scales.
My grandfather, filleting fish,
fit me in the skin.
Ichthyosis, jutting long line in a short poem.
At school they ooh and aah
queues of them to touch the grit,
crinkling white clutch shunting
off a dying birch.
Show them the unaching scars
as if I received these
symboled marks
for their breath only!
says Coriolanus in English class.
We're their side-show, a need
to know how riddled we are, and so
to feel smooth themselves.
Will they recognize me
in tomorrow's skin suit
rioting roots beneath
the bed, polluted air
of me and my dead?
Have they consumed me yet?
I die faster
minute by minute.
Flesh
4 and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie . . .
as the needle's eye looks for mincemeat inside.
Who knew they could all fit?
Unfolding a thousand times
over, from plant to blue to needle's plow
across the blank hayfield of my leg.
They're coming up for me.
How do they see through
such a black lens?
The crow's sense
is underestimated
at the estimator's expense.
"What will you name her?"
the tattoo mystic says to me,
tickling my thigh like a baby's,
while the crow's belly
with its tender sheet
inches over my shy body
like ink on the underside of heaven.
She's made it over my chest,
nipples a smudge,
disappearing towards my inside
horizon, hairy skies.
My skin repeating itself,
black limb on black limb
making what white is left glow alien,
splintered web of moon
at the bottom of a stone well.
the punk poet tattoo lady
has a mother's unbreaking touch.
The crow's wing brushes
the nape of my neck.
I'm drowning in them.
Crows don't down,
their baby feathers
are never found.
AJ Powell
The Road to Homer
As the brief night lifts its gray blanket
My eyes drink long draughts of wilderness
The road is hedged by granite crumble and rock slab
The flora is white lace and purple garnish
Peninsular waters of cold turquoise flash sunlight
Off the wings of a blanched low-soaring seabird
Waterfall strands plummet past the height of skyscrapers
Down mountain mammoths my sight can’t keep in frame
Clouds in highest climes perch on peaks
Like egrets on the shoulders of elephants
The spires of this cathedral are green tangle-trees
Snagging my soul on their branches
My throat is thick with gasping
I am diminutive and wide-eyed
My senses are swallowed
By the ample world
If civilization drowns in the ices we melt
I will come here, become a bear,
And feast on salmon and honey
Caterpillar Girl
Daughter, did I step on you?
Caterpillar of my heart
With your spiney sensitivity
Feeling for the world’s
Hard corners and soft edges
Inching along
Bristly-soft and vulnerable
You taste and test
And button-hunt and press
And press and press
To know your power
Build your defenses
Arm yourself and
With charm and glances
Disarm us
My foot falls heavy and large sometimes
My beak-like words
Peck and threaten to consume
Your still-soft self
I am sorry
I will do better to protect for you
This world-sized, lifelong
Chrysallis
Your wings are readying
Present and developing
At times dampened by sorrow
And the everyday betrayals we adults visit upon
You and all child-hearts
Inch along still, growing girl
Travel and transform
Then
Spread
Lift
Ascend
But perch again
Near
I’ll tame my steps yet
Life is sandpaper on silk
Snags are inevitable
When the beautiful and the rough
Rub against each other like lovers
It isn’t the sandpaper’s fault
Ontologically speaking
It has its place, can make
A hewn log as smooth as . . .
Silk too has its attributes
A fragile beauty which
Falls like water, whisper soft on skin
(Though I’m not sure the worm’s perspective on it)
Life is the terrible disappearing space between them
The unraveling of fine things
Brought too close for their own good
Balmy summer temperatures meet ice caps
And all our polar bears are left drowning
Lives march to matter more than gunshots
Neighborhoods divide along fault lines
Of difference and indifference
Mid-life crises leave children
Half-orphaned every other week and holidays
How can we contain our contradictions?
How do we reconcile
Peace and power
Romance and reality
The Just Cause and the just flawed
Without tearing up hearts or
Lopping off heads in private jihads
Bloody and holy and now?
Life is sandpaper on silk
Or a junkie’s temporary ecstasy
Or a flaming marshmallow—sugar turned to ash
Sun Salutation
We rest at night under star shine or cloud cover
Forgetting
The sun is always mountaineering
Our sun makes a repetition of ascents we suckle on
Like a baby at the breast, hovering hummingbird at blossom
We sip and sup the sun assuming
She will never tire, always return
The golden orb sits herself upon the horizon
Gathers her breath
And begins her climb to the peak of the sky
Onl
y to descend from her zenith
To a rest she never reaches
Finding yet another day to scale
And so she clambers on
Delivering again to us
The gossamer goodness
Of her warmth and illumination
When the world turns cactus on us
When our atmosphere burns toxic with vitriol
When life is a live wire that snaps toward our hearts
When our minds lay the lash down on our own backs
Then let us look up
The sky is firmament
And we are living upside-down
So in the morning
I will sit under the caress
Of the sun’s side-slanting first rays
And consider my small self
I will watch the sun Rise
Gather my thankful breath
And proceed, breathing
Leaping with Esther
“Who knows whether,” or so the story goes, “you have been lifted up
For such a time as this?”
A question, not a statement:
Who knows whether?
For there is God’s grace spread abroad in the world
And then there is consistent stupidity and even
Dumb Luck
I for one can’t tell the difference
Most days are through a glass darkly
And no clarion Christ calls to me
From the noise of my circumstances
God visits me like light skipping on water
My life briefly blessed by
A ripple that makes me blink
And but for my watering eyes
I might not know it was there
Such is the God I know and love
Better by the contours of my longing
Than my faith
So, “Who knows whether?”
A grand Maybe, a glorious Perhaps
Holding familiar uncertainties:
Dark Humor and Bright Pain and “Who knows whether?”
A plan exists, things come together for good
Or
We are simply spinning unhinged in a fathomless sky
All we know is Esther
Writhed in great anguish, risked her very life
For permission to throw a cocktail party
She must’ve read the Psalmist who penned the 23rd:
Yay though I walk
“Fast for me.”
Through the Valley of Death
“If I perish I perish”
Thus she dressed in her best,
Prepared to gamble on her best guesses