Tired Foxes

It's been so, so long since I've posted here, so I may be talking to an empty page, but I wanted to share my latest poem. She's a collaboration piece with my husband, and my best so far. Alina Willow, born 6.16.17 My whole world. What did I ever do before loving you? I hope you're all well and still writing, reading. I will return, in time. xxoo

You have an affinity toward voluminous hats but I love to visualize myself uprooting wildflowers from the farmland behind your childhood home and sketching them into the margins of your leather-bound texts, gifting them back to you on holidays, but the tractors had come through shortly after you shifted toward New York, carrying your pen knife, and your grandfather’s pocket watch. Now the solstice approaches and the graphite pencils have all been weakened by the humidity so I disturb the elfin brass bell fastened above the door of the gift shop on Holland Ave, and scour for the most sizable hat.

Off to Valhalla with him, I whisper, while I scratch her behind the ear with one hand.

Life update: It’s impossible for me to produce anything anymore. I need to write, create, cook, but my body rebels.

Poetry on. <3 

I have never taken a drink from a mountain spring or taken new honey on my tongue straight from the hive while the bee tangled itself in the ends of my hair making a nest in the craters of my braid, but I have stood still among the pinewood and bent to brush the mushrooms with my fingertips after a sun-rain. I have fed the fauna of New England, trampled the wildflowers in Indiana, and kissed the mouths of men afflicted with delusion, so I have equally known the cool and the sweet of the water and the comb.

I am no writer, I am simply a typist  of words spun up into mountains of sky blue clouds on a paper cone, so sweet that they eat them up like candy, silver wrapper and all.

I think she’s casting spells up there. I watch the thick smoke snake under the doors, sage and something stronger, hear the wind chimes clanging and crying when not so much as a leaf is shivering on the dead oak in the yard. To know her in daylight is to know the sun, alive and throbbing with fire, with meaning. Cutting back branches, a new coat of blood red paint on the wooden Radio Flyer she plants annuals in. The plants bend to her, as if she were their mother. She is their mother. In daylight. The sun though dips early in mid-February and then she is a star. Not so bright, so abstract as a star, but dead matter afloat in an oil slick of sky. The annuals take her lead and their wet bulbs crack open and stretch their tangles into soft wood. Become magic in the night, awaiting her next sun-bloom visit so they may sigh and open at her will. She pounds down our door and I answer dressed in something close to fear, a thin cloak of it across my naked chest. The membrane of skin keeping my heart in its place does nothing more than that. She can see each blood soaked beat of it staining my smile, reddening the spaces between my teeth. You behind me laughing at my wild imagination, her before me, witchy in her long tendrils of ashy hair like roots, not curled but twisted and snarled. A long white bed gown down to her ankles and thick pale feet with nails painted black as if from frost bite. She asks of the flashing red lights, the tow truck, the twenty minutes of men’s voices as they hauled away my truck from the pavement outside. I explain there’s nothing to be worried about as I wring my hands behind my back, grip at my spine. You still laughing somewhere in the dark. I sign to you back there, about the yellow eyes and the scar that crosses back and forth over her chin (I’ve never seen that before, in daylight) when the moon bows over us. When she leave my cloak falls away in the breeze and the storm door turns angry and closes as if on its own, done, finished with this scene. My membrane skin regains its color: a bruised green. Black flies circle the fruit bowl and pick at an apple that hadn’t been brown an hour before. You toss it in the air and catch it on your tongue saying when they start to rot it’s as if they’d been baked in brown sugar, as if into a pie. I fall into bed with a fever. I say I think she’s casting spells up there. She’s just a landlord, you say. And our rent is coming due. You bite the mealy flesh of the apple again, spitting the fly bitten skin into the sink.

Hedgehog bath time around here.

Blooming book crafts.

Green Bean would smile, on the edge of sleep against her mother’s softness and decide, as she did every day, that she didn’t care where she got her name. She’d tell her mother so, and then fall into a curled up cat nap that she’d wake from in her bed later. When she woke, she might ask again about her name, or she might not. And at dinner, she’d gladly eat her potatoes, and soup, and drink all of her milk and smile widely at her mother, who was better at keeping secrets than any other person she’d ever meet. She just knew it.

LOCUSTS & WILD HONEY