Judas Hand

 

 

 

 

Judas Hand

( a 55)

 

March howls its broken promise

to erase the extra decades in your bones;

 

you're spent in bed still feeling

the burn that made the ash.

 

The ghostwind cuts

your lips with a dead man's kiss.

 

You forget hummingbirds are coming

like children cured by the sea

 

and wish you'd never bet

on that judas hand.

 

 

 

 

March 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for the Word Garden Word List 

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: a poker hand of black aces and eights with a card in the hole is called a dead man's hand, after the hand held by Wild Bill Hickok when he was shot in the back of the head in Deadwood, Dakota Territory 1876. It's also known as the judas hand. Alternatively, a judas hand can be three tens, representing the thirty pieces of silver Judas Iscariot received for betraying Jesus Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Landscape in Stormy Weather 1885 ©Vincent Van Gogh  Public Domain

Display in Deadwood, South Dakota with the dead man's hand (here given as A♠ A♣ 8♠ 8♣ 9♦) Vidor at English Wikipedia.Public Domain

Friday Flash Fiction 55 for January, 2020

Welcome all, to our first Friday 55
of the new year.
 

On the last Friday of every month, I will once again host the opportunity to have both a kick-ass weekend and share a poem, piece of prose poetry or short fiction on any subject; 
in fact, whatever, 
so long as it's in the form of 55 words, no more, no less. 

The prompt will be live from Friday at 12:00 AM til Sunday at 4:00 PM. 

This is an informal sort of place, so there's no Mr Linky. Just copy and paste a link to your 55 in the comments.

Here's a link to the html code for those who like to leave a short and neat one word link.

Here is my own contribution:

 Widow's Wind

One marriage that burned,

another that froze,

one dead-alive so long ago,

a breath of dream for a child to grow;

all lost in the time-storm's

 rosemary-spice,   

all holocaust

with an angel's form,

and a devil's price.

But a silence of moon,

the windowing woods,

a widowing wind,

ink's sudden flood;

these now are good.

~January 2020

The 55 is a writer's challenge in exactly 55 words, initiated years ago by Galen Hayes, and when he passed on, continued at various times by The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Kerry O'Connor, and by me. When I began doing this prompt in 2017, I wrote a lot about my feelings for it and for poetry blogging. If you'd like to read the background material, you'll find it here, in my Friday 55 Preamble Wanderings.  Unfortunately, the prompt will not be weekly at this time.

Images in order of appearance:  55 chevy pick up truck, via internet, manipulated, fair use

Mountain Fire,  1903, ©John Singer Sargent. Public Domain

Cottage On Fire At Night, circa 1750, ©Joseph Wright. Public Domain

 

SHE

SHE

Her tangled tongue tides infinitely, a stuttering sea

pounding the sense of sand to nonsense.

Her hand is a foot, her pale beak-hook

tears liver from a red-cursed god on a rock.

She sneaks her wings off the mariposa

to discuss the death of a crawling worm

all for a bloody flutter and fall, to pound in our ears

her liver-flecked lie as sweet sufferer's sense,

her mirror eye all on the wrong side, broken

but bright, reflecting the shine of her fracture-knives

cutting deep as she can into watching clay

but clay won't bleed and SHE can't see

that no more will we

ever have what SHE needs.

~January 2016

 posted for        real toads

Weekend Challenge

 mariposa: Spanish for butterfly

Sculptures by Pablo Picasso, photos by Karin Gustafson
All rights reserved to whoever owns them.

Fairytale Eyes

Fairytale Eyes

A lie in the light has

a harsh color. It

takes more from you

than the whispered fictions

darkness speaks.

Her doll button eyes so black

and slick as bullets,

dead as Tut without the glitter tomb

dead alive as the man

peeled off the cross sent

spinning into limbo,

are looking at a hundred

pink and purple moons.

Black on black and black again;

a pungent sponge of shadow

fills the killing jar, 

whose thin glass is so
unexpectedly unbreakable

unbearable until it tells itself

the once upon a time
transformation

the shimmering glamored lie.

The moon does not
at her moment of fulfillment
dress in lace and belled skirts.

She's not some cinder-urchin

after midnight, so don't say she is--

you with your cracked mirror

and blue iris of ice.

The moon is no drudge

pushed wretched in the ashes

befriended by anthropomorphic mice,

some missing slipper profaned

by Brobdingnagian feet.

~*~

Doll button eyes

were turquoise once, 

before she was locked

so firmly in this box

(or before she opened in 

this unaccountable

exploding burlesque.)

Now they're a noisy void,

Kleig lights on a stage

for mincing dreams, productions

of pranking Punchinellos, pageants

of Catherine-wheel princesses

lit by slender flames of wicked

wick'd stepmothers

dancing spots and talking dots,

who grant favors to their own,

sly torments to the rest with

circle-faced smirks
of mime-white and red.

The moon is no sleeping beauty,

more the witch whose mirror
always tells the most
obvious unwelcome truth,

or perhaps it's the apple itself
swollen with the viridian
juice of malice, so round

so beautiful so dead, 

floating its centuplicated replicas

all so wavering bloody pink, 

so saturated purple

that just one lovely bite

can drown the world.

Black on black pours out still

the lie of colors drop by splash

to the last: the changeling's
handsome prince, dashingly

backlit in psychedelic flash, 

the recapture-when-released technique

of the King of Beasts, the Beast Himself

come to lap the tears of weeping Beauty,
a savior wearing gold and green 

and Bluebeard's face,

the key to the sealed room

teasing in his pocket.

~September 2015

posted for    real toads

Weekend Challenge

Process Note: I have chosen to write about Charles Bonnet Syndrome, also called 'visual release hallucinations,' a neurological condition of the blind which produces vivid, often formulaic hallucinations, discussed by Oliver Sacks in his book, Hallucinations.

Images: The Fire Wheel, 1893, by James MacNeil Whistler, public domain, manipulated.

Bluebeard, 1862, by Gustave Dore,  engraving, public domain

Bitter Cold

Bitter Cold

Even in the bitterest cold

your body snakes itself

away from mine

to make its own wallow

shivering but uncrowded,

so that in this stranger's chair

in the decembered black,

I have only a thin sheet of paper 

for warmth,

and you 

a rucked bed, too strait

for touching.

The cold is so big

it chills fresh-boiled coffee 

in the cup,

stiffens each bone it meets

with the old ache. Yet here

in its stone room

I am warmer
than tight in a futile quilt

for this paper I burn,

set on fire

with a script of bright flames,
giving

the wink of a true eye

the stroke of a seeing hand
opening

the buried door that leads

 to the summer country

and every song

as you bear winter alone,

deaf in the slack tide

of your darkening sleep.

~Dec 2014, 

revisions April, 2015

posted for

 National Poetry Month with Magaly Guerrero

Day 2 Challenge: Creativity and Pain

Magaly is generously throwing her blog and her creativity into the ring for this year's April insanity, and providing a prompt a day to help us along. Today she asks us to : "explore creativity as a healing salve, as a shield, as a weapon, or as a negotiation method to use when dealing with physical and/or psychological pain"

Process notes: "The moment that the tidal current ceases is called slack water or slack tide. The tide then reverses direction and is said to be turning.."~wikipedia

Images: Cabin Interior, ©joyannjones 2014

Footer: Summer Bedroom, by Jacob Yanek, Fair use via wikipaintings.org