I am learning to show up even when I want to stay home.
I am learning that wants can’t always be trusted
but often intuition can.
I am learning that I don’t need to know how it will turn out
in order to make a make a move.
I am learning that no one else knows either.
Continue reading “decomposition”
Category: Poetry
The Roots of Weeds
Tomorrow
by David BudbillTomorrow
we are
bones and ash,
the roots of weeds
poking through
our skulls.Today,
simple clothes,
empty mind,
full stomach,
alive, aware,
right here,
right now.Drunk on music,
who needs wine?Come on,
Sweetheart,
let’s go dancing
while we’ve
still got feet.
Side Way
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
– William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act ii, Scene 1
In case of paralysis, break glass. Out there
is here. Stairs, a whining thud, fat-bellied
cicada trapped in a breezeway
flings itself from wall to wall
until it surrenders
to defeat, so much like gravity.
Even with its trident of five eyes,
it is blind to the way through.
Corridor becomes vault. Had it been born
a bluebottle butterfly, it might stand a better chance,
its photoreceptors detecting
a million colors
more than those five eyes,
and far beyond what our feeble pair perceive
(and so believe). We are as wary of spectrometers
and their evidence of hidden hues
as we are of quantum wavefunction
and infrared snapshots of the Kuiper belt. Continue reading “Side Way”
Sewn
She bends the split seam of her story
around her son. A boundary, a stitching.
Protection.
Image: Antoni Clavé, “The Child with the Cage”
The First Walk After Goodbye
The trees are stage set,
a Las Vegas cabaret
on this suburban strip.
Lightning bugs in their drunken throb
dip and tumble
loose as the purple rope
of night falls
open. They couldn’t care less
who lurks here gaping
at their naked hunger.
Oblivious to the shape of you
emptying out of me,
they fill it the way they do
every hollow place, the way light
always does
but for just that blink
no matter how long we want it
bright and no matter how tight
we seal the lid. It goes out
again, a strobe
pulse, a chemical
flash burning to photon
guttering to black
before we can pin it in place
on this map of shadows.
Somehow the flicker
is enough, more
than enough, each firefly’s rutting
insistence a fizz that tickles full
the belly like sky
even with all that air
between each burst of light.
Image: Wolfepaw, “Pregnant Lightning Bug” at Deviant Art
Counting Country
2 hawks burst from the upper branches
1 doe steps, pauses, steps again into the brush
1 neon-green bug skitters under the cover of a fallen leaf
On its back, 1 tiny frog pinwheels its legs until I toe it upright and it springs into the weeds
3 patches of vines curl around their stash of not-yet-ripe raspberries
5 fingers of thorns twist across the frothy pink blush of not-yet-ripe blackberries
1 pond plucks and echoes with the calls of rubber-band frogs
2 tractors packed with children and parents wave and rumble and sway and wave some more
12 rows of new corn cascade up and out, as high as a goat’s belly
1 creek warbles along its stone bank, becomes another as it bends into shadow, another as it reappears in a cut of morning light
100 blades of grass tickle four bare calves
1 lone cow glances up and continues to chew, 1 ear flicking at a half dozen flies
1 roller truck with 2 steel wheels makes 6, 7, 8 passes over the gravel lot pressing its noise over every other word
3 children sit in 3 patches of shade eating 3 mounds of shaved ice in 3 meting stripes of flavor
4 children in helmets lead 4 stoic horses into a barn
8 children with bare heads ride 8 plastic horses in lazy circles
2 women step between damp sponges of earth into the cascading chiaroscuro of leaf and web and wing
Image: Walt Curlee, “Appalachian Blackberry Patch Farm” from Walt Curlee Art
You Too
don’t need to hear it
to know it
so i say it
for him. i love you
baby
and you love me
too.
no
he says
no i don’t
i actually
hate you. Continue reading “You Too”
Cooking for One
my tongue craves skin, my skin
tongue. how to eat when the only flavor
is salt? too poor for the extravagance
of a meal served to me, i recall the logic
of giving the beloved what you want
for yourself. this woman
is her own again, my only lover
here. In the kitchen i peel
off my clothes and wrap around my hips
an oceanic gust from the cotton bolt
i brought from Zimbabwe
half this life before
and gave to a dear one who returned to me
one yard in thanks, tiny stitches,
this skirt. heat tears through
onion silk. with the long blade
i slice gold threads of ginger. oil pops
as punjabi mc strips the carapace
and wings unfold from my hips.
roil and scrape. peanut, coconut, turmeric, cumin.
cabbage, tomato, cauliflower, honey.
masala dust clings to raw arms, ribs
sweat red clay heat. mouth gorged
with song, the feeding precedes
the eating. my tongue thrills at the naked
steam curling into its hidden cells, my skin
tilts towards the kaleidoscope
of scents. i serve my beloved
a dish and she returns to me
one birth in thanks, tiny bloodbeats,
this night. the only flavor
is never the only flavor. the body can taste
every texture of loss. the body can learn
to boil sugar
from the heart.
Ecdysis
Honeysuckle and waning moon. Outside
the door, freedom leaves
boots of alligator
teeth. They only fit you
when you take off
your skin
shaped name. Slice along seams
and peel back your tattoos,
those catalogues of cravings.
Permanence
is the chorus you memorized
and forgot
someone wrote. Before it
was,
it wasn’t.
You don’t go. You stay.
The going one is a stranger
with motives
unclear,
blood type
unknown.
Tesselation and Return
Do you remember when we cracked our saddles against the flared skyline?
Morning is a container of lists now.
You rail in tight packets
and wear the fallen prism.
Swimming sidelong, the ring
in miniature
slides in next to the scratches
you squint into my waterlogged
furrow.
Your paddle, my web.
Your vigil, my birth.
The inverse of collapse is an empty rescue.
(Your collar
my attempt to soar)
Shannon E. Williams 