sleeping with Odysseus under the
wild blackberries
Even
though it's true that garbage peeks out
_ziplock,
for example, its lips
a
pink and blue pucker under the white
bell
of a morning glory_
some
days the only solution to the haunting
_childhood pain andshame pale and hissing_
is
to hide out in the margins,
and
in the wasted ground find
kinship
with the blackberry thorns
and
the strangling vines.
Childhood
ghosts visit as clenched hands,
long
scratches puckering blood
like
red kisses between curved islands of dirt;
her
ghost calls from the long shadow
between
Scylla and Charybdis
and
takes the form of dead leaves
woven
amongst my braid_
In
the Achilles-grey of the forlorn mind,
when
only the body's blood will do,
offered
to the warrior's shade
(a
thimble toward an unquenchable thirst)
against
this, the green leaf's vertical triumph,
mounding
over piles_broken brick, bent rebar
detritus
of the still-breathing_
this
veridian lunge for the bright
pulls
tight against the throat
and
the ziplock, mouth gaping
in
the unmoving air at despair's doorway_
we
down in dirt's levelling_
_we
are all silent and waiting.
carrion flowers
These are no flowers for a grave yard.
Blue petals exuberant and tenacious,
no thinned skin of life, sucking roots,
taking home as they do, what remains of fauna's
humming molecular. In what passes
for floral veins, the whole earth is undone,
flower's penduncle engorged,
the sky a puked eruption of over-fed stamen and pistil,
that floral singularity of universal production;
today it's as if this small blue-petaled stigmatic lip
has dribbled out the entire rocky shore of this
tectonic plate; as if blown through
the deep-bottomed style, the embyro sac
projecting out the hanging blue of sea and sky;
as if our world fell, the last drops disgorged
from that small flowered ovum,
the earth, and the material universe,
Dickinson's twisted grace. Of course its all
quite ridiculous. Such a fancy to be birthed
by flowers, when really your small pile of ashes
blown amongst their roots means that you will be eaten;
your remaining mineral count fitted into hungry mouths
tonguing the world, this shared home,
with the standard blind longing. That's the thing:
your uncle crying something about the eye of god,
I'm not sure if he means you, who will be eaten
by the blue, or some longing for justice
in a world where such narratives are the ephemera
of so few, that like numbers
many are irreal, and so, most of us never
encounter them; and yet such notions of god,
of justice and conceptual eternities have their uses.
In fluid dynamics, for example, the running
of oxytocin's hope, of making it past this damn pain.
It is a thin kind of solace that your nitrites
will someday eat another small child;
even meaner perhaps that what was your body
must have been the remains of the long dead,
a tumble of flora and fauna, the flown eyelash
of a man died here 2000 years ago, the dissolved
claw of a species of corvid no longer, and of course
the thin blossomed tongue of a magnolia tree
that lived here so long ago that it ate
of worn down mountains,
already in the process of being reborn.
What tears there are for you, your sister pulling
the blue petals one by one from their solar berth,
mixing them with your ashes
like some chemical wedding of earth and sky,
will do no harm, and no good,
but for the metaphor, our projected survival
of your loss. For now, we are just this:
no flowers, instead, chemistry ravenous for home.
Blue petals exuberant and tenacious,
no thinned skin of life, sucking roots,
taking home as they do, what remains of fauna's
humming molecular. In what passes
for floral veins, the whole earth is undone,
flower's penduncle engorged,
the sky a puked eruption of over-fed stamen and pistil,
that floral singularity of universal production;
today it's as if this small blue-petaled stigmatic lip
has dribbled out the entire rocky shore of this
tectonic plate; as if blown through
the deep-bottomed style, the embyro sac
projecting out the hanging blue of sea and sky;
as if our world fell, the last drops disgorged
from that small flowered ovum,
the earth, and the material universe,
Dickinson's twisted grace. Of course its all
quite ridiculous. Such a fancy to be birthed
by flowers, when really your small pile of ashes
blown amongst their roots means that you will be eaten;
your remaining mineral count fitted into hungry mouths
tonguing the world, this shared home,
with the standard blind longing. That's the thing:
your uncle crying something about the eye of god,
I'm not sure if he means you, who will be eaten
by the blue, or some longing for justice
in a world where such narratives are the ephemera
of so few, that like numbers
many are irreal, and so, most of us never
encounter them; and yet such notions of god,
of justice and conceptual eternities have their uses.
In fluid dynamics, for example, the running
of oxytocin's hope, of making it past this damn pain.
It is a thin kind of solace that your nitrites
will someday eat another small child;
even meaner perhaps that what was your body
must have been the remains of the long dead,
a tumble of flora and fauna, the flown eyelash
of a man died here 2000 years ago, the dissolved
claw of a species of corvid no longer, and of course
the thin blossomed tongue of a magnolia tree
that lived here so long ago that it ate
of worn down mountains,
already in the process of being reborn.
What tears there are for you, your sister pulling
the blue petals one by one from their solar berth,
mixing them with your ashes
like some chemical wedding of earth and sky,
will do no harm, and no good,
but for the metaphor, our projected survival
of your loss. For now, we are just this:
no flowers, instead, chemistry ravenous for home.
premeditation
Over
graves no longer marked,
the
track curls up hill back
toward
the house. At the turn,
the
remaining pieces of Red-dog
lay,
curled round by dented snow.
His
lower jaw, still there.
An
articulated neck. A few ribs.
The
long bones of his legs,
gone,
the hips finally taken,
maybe
by some other dog,
a
coyote, a badger.
I
stopped,
my
feet in their usual place
either
side of his ragged white teeth.
When
the last bone was left,
I
would pick it up, take it home
to
my kitchen, grind it,
and
feed it to the man
who shot him and
left him for dead.
Bio:
A poet (and now a writer of flash fiction), Carol Shillibeer is
trying to learn how to think in narrative (which is why flash
fiction). When not struggling with being out of her experimental
depths, she thinks about what it must be like to be a human being
living without language; she reads Isaac Newton and tries valiantly
to understand what he had to say; she solicitously seeks silence.
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