Badlands

Badlands

I went to sleep

in the cotton rows

child's hands raw,

belly empty as

my mother's brown eyes

 that hot day she left me

alone by the river mud's soft folded stink.

I cracked my lids

in the hard nitre'd bed where

time cries out loud in the torture of change,

where rain becomes air

on dry roserock hills, deep in the gulch

where the snake promised water

and had nothing but dust

visions without sight,

day without night. I was small as

the sand when I rose up again

on the last thermal's wings,

on the story of gulls, on the wild windy

ballad the dark singer sang

to the tide in my bones.

January 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge,

 Water

Process note: I've tried to present here the transition from the presence of water, to its absence. The bottom photo is of natural geologic erosion in the Borrego Badlands of California, and the top, work in the cotton fields possibly in Oklahoma(?) around the turn of the century.* This poem tries to bridge the gap between, for what are fields now may in the future become the desert landscape, moonlike and barren, that the climate has made of the badlands, which extend over much of the western part of the US, from New Mexico to California.

Header Image, *Picking cotton, author, location and date unknown, from an Oklahoma heritage FB site, public domain (the people on this site discussed their memories of grandparents or parents hand-working the cotton fields in Oklahoma as children. Oklahoma still grows cotton and was the fourth largest producer in the US, according to this 2017 report. )

Footer Image: Borrego Badlands, California USA, author unknown, Fair Use.

Winter In The Blood

Winter In The Blood

The harvest is lost in the fields

when you're riding the crest of the flood;

spring is forever gone south

once winter gets into your blood.

Do the spirits you send me at night,

who twitch in the day's flame of dream,

long for a life behind glass

where their grief-mirrors silently scream?

I hang up their bottles by noon

as the mist leaves the prickling wood;

how it crawls where the heart cannot come

for winter has got in its blood.

Don't haunt the dead doorway tonight.

Don't put your white worm in the bud.

Don't look through the glass like you know

that winter was born in my blood.

August 2019-January 2020

a quick singsong, for Fireblossom at

The Sunday Muse:

"In old southern tradition, hanging bottles from a tree is intended to catch or confuse negative spirits.."

Images: Lace and Ghosts, 1856, drawing © Victor Hugo Public Domain. Manipulated.

Bottle Tree,  Author Unknown. Fair Use.

Green Rose

Green Rose

A scarf of silk night,

green smell of stars;

I spilled

my  flourish of runes,

 flashing thru the tarnish of life

a quick pierce of joy

 from the scatterboned grave

that what was did exist;

that the heart did once grow 

a green rose in the stars,

fragrant and foolish 

before time lost its rhyme

January 2020

an anticipatory 55 for earthweal

OpenLink

The Friday 55 will be back on this blog the last Friday of every month, beginning January 31st.

Images: Emerald Green Rose © Jennie Marie Schell

Rune, wunjo, from the Elder Futhark, meaning joy. Artist Unknown. Fair Use

Bodyless Parts

Bodyless Parts

My heart is pale

as the daylight moon hiding

in the pines, trying to be full

with her south end sliced off;

a bent lamp to light

a ghost's foot.

My mind's black as soil

where skeletal leaves fall

from century's last rose, in the

color of memory wisteria blue, or

lavender as lamb's ear in thick sticky spikes

that trembled like your hand

with the loving of bees.

I would tell them you've gone

put out like a lamp, or a moon

snuffed to new;  bees like to know

but they're husks in their hives

with their fat queen's stilled hum,

legs stiff as your lips so unsaved

by sacrifice, or perpetual labor

deep in the rose hips.

My eyes drip a mirror of scarlet birds.

I'll watch through the glass til all of us die

til our pink watery ghosts flow up and fall,

haunts with the bees in rose sunset sky.

~January 2020

posted for Ghosts

at earthweal

Process notes: 

1) It's a longstanding tradition dating as far back as medieval times for beekeepers to go to their apiaries and inform the bees when someone in the household died so the bees could also mourn.  

2) There is currently a worldwide pandemic of honey bee deaths, thought to be caused by pesticides and resultant weakening of the bees' immune systems. 8 species of bees are on the endangered species list, but not as yet the honey bee. Nonetheless, there have not been any honey or bumblebees in my own garden for at least the last three or four years.

Images: Wisteria and Bee, © Ohara Koson, 1930, Public Domain

Weird Sky, 2015 ©joyannjones

Watch This Space for the Return of the 55

Greetings, all. 

I would like to welcome you to the revival of the Friday tradition of the Flash Fiction 55, the first of which will take place January 31st. The challenge will post at Thursday midnight and be good thru Sunday, on the last Friday of every month. Your entry can be in any style or form, prose, fiction, non-fiction, and of course,poetry, so long as it consists of 55 words, and 55 only.

I had been hosting this challenge for awhile in honor of its originator, Galen Hayes and his form that never fails until my husband's illness accelerated and I became unable to do so. Kerry O'Connor generously took it up and continued it as a once a month prompt at the now archived Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. Since that forum is no longer available, and Kerry has indicated her approval, I hope to continue in that format now that my life has calmed a bit. 

For many of us who spent years regarding the Garden as our own favorite site for poetry, with its uniquely intelligent and multitudinous prompts and features, and its inhabitants as our cohorts in literary crime, its retirement leaves a bit of a blank spot. Other sites, new such as earthweal, and  old, like d'Verse will surely help to fill that spot, but it's a large hollow space, and it seems to me there is room for this challenge as well to keep us writing and to keep our community together. Plus, I am a huge fan of the 55, and often when I feel I can't write anything, it will prove me wrong by popping 55 words up for me. So here's to Galen, the 55, and all of you whom I hope will participate.

See you on the 31st.

Birthday Moonsong

Birthday Moonsong

Born  in the wolf moon,

at century's half-crack,

before the moving shadow box

before the singing pocket, the talking hand--

disjecta  membra of a war and peace,

nuclear snowflake crystaled in the cold aftermath,

fallout caught and whirled up

by black arms of concrete

into the sweet dance of chemical fog;

all around me

blackbirds falling

from the sky like almanacs

pages open to the gift of silent prophecy

and in the mirror, a white raven

solitary,
a meal, a target, a danger

to the flock, burning the eye like
a scarlet poppy

on a gravemound, or

a working girl unbuttoned

hungover 

in the convent.

* * *

In the house

at the edge of the world,

with the wolf moon low in the west,

its yellow eye on the scattering stars,

its tongue longing

for the fat white hams of Venus,

the north wind sleets the window glass

bitter green, rattling the taste

of old snow and bad design; the wolf moon

the hunger moon,
stops to lap

pooled pink from blood-red Mars,

swells its belly 

with faltering stars, the small and weak
gnawing them out one by one as I hum

dusting the ape statuettes, the

draped clocks, perplexed still

that the empty chair

stays empty another winter,

while the fire throws white shadows,

while ghosts fall with the snow.

~January 2015

A repost for my birthday.

Images:Wolf Dog, 1976 © Jamie Wyrth  Fair Use

The Snow Queen Flies Through The Winter Night, by Edmund Dulac  Fair Use