Conjuring

poem & photo by Elizabeth
CONJURING


Pursuing the brilliance of scarlet macaws, the insides of blood oranges, a blue so deep wind scrapes spray off the crests of waves, I remember the shock of blue against black in the face of our Siamese cat who had asthma like me. The runt of the litter, he would play till he collapsed, a hump of fur, sides heaving, mouth open, eyes closed, thin high wheezes accompanying each impossible breath. I’d massage him when he wheezed and couldn’t understand why he was put to sleep. In the following weeks I hid in my room when I had asthma, scared the next time it would be me. Or that I’d be sent away like my older sister who rarely called and was only spoken of when I asked, though I knew better. She juggled oranges, made dimes disappear before pulling them from my ears, and tickled me till laughter and her fingers were all that existed, masking even that keen longing for my father’s return.

I’d watch for him on commercials with tall smiling men holding their daughters and in the families saved by Casper and Mighty Mouse. I craved him as other kids told how their dads were lawyers like Perry Mason, doctors like Kildare, or were so strong they built houses and carried their kids around piggyback. I knew if I were good enough he wouldn’t be dead anymore. He’d come back if I did what I was told, was nice, always smiled. I felt him in the large arms of men and reached for him as I placed my feet on top of another man’s huge shoes, my arms stretching up, our hands holding as he walked, my feet and body shadowing his beneath uncontrolled laughter. My father became my guardian angel after I stepped alone onto the red ant nest hidden in rattlesnake grass. I screamed as their teeth tore flesh till large arms swept me up and carried me to cold water to dampen the hot sting.

Stinging like the night I packed my suitcase and ran away. Three blocks later I stashed my pink case, heavy and awkward in my six-year-old arms, behind Melissa’s neatly trimmed hedge. I didn’t know her well enough to ring the doorbell. I was unexpected, uninvited, yet she was the only girl whose house I recognized as it got dark. Peering through the opening between ivory drapes, I saw their dining room table set for dinner, her brothers playing beyond, and was startled by her father when he turned the corner of the outside of their house and asked what I was doing. Scared to say I’d run away, I asked if Melissa could play. As he pulled the long metal rod off the chain link fence, inserted it onto the sprinkler unit, and turned the water on full, he told me it was late, I should be home, out of the dark. I nodded, walked toward my house till he went inside, and then returned. Hugging the shadows, I watched them talk and laugh as her father cut thick slices of roast beef. I stared through that narrow lens of window and strained to hear words, learn their language.

When it got too cold, I went home. My mom, draped in diamonds and a low-cut red-sequined dress, was about to leave for cocktails. She said she knew I’d be back, that I had nowhere to go. I went to my room, pulled toy soldiers out of my closet, set up lines of defense, before she called me back, told me to fix the lower hinge, loose and squeaky, on her bedroom door. I tightened and oiled the hinge just as I would later tighten and oil the wheels and handlebars on my bike to ride the fire trails behind our house. Rubber scraped from my soles as I skidded round curves and clutched my handlebars as firmly as I had gripped the barrel of the rifle when I was seven. Aiming for cans, I pulled the trigger, my shoulder mottled blue, yellow, green, from the rifle slamming against my too thin body. But I kept pulling, conjuring my father in the activities of men.

And myself in the motion of animals. I would leap over objects with the fierce gallop of horses, move with the stealth of the great horned owl that rose like an apparition across a too huge autumn moon, or run with the cunning of the mouse beneath my red plastic wheelbarrow. Our best mouser couldn’t squeeze her tiger-striped face under the barrow so she placed her front paws on top of it, perhaps to jump, but it tilted and moved forward. The mouse paced itself to remain underneath so our cat stopped periodically to sweep her clawed paw between the wheels before returning to her hind legs to push farther. Near the cabbage plants the mouse darted into shadowed green. Tracing my finger through air, I tracked the means of escape. 


Thank you to the editors of Kalliope for first publishing this prose poem.

Graffito

poem & photo by Elizabeth

GRAFFITO

Three distinct letters, 
discrete as whispers
yet stark as sunrise,
stain this park’s 
concrete wall. 

S insinuates 
the dark entrance,
secret from those
passwordless,
but once in, one
snakes along this
sinuous passage

toward E, 
which sighs
like a wind-filled
cavern 
in the fold of a word
so bare 
it exposes the language of pores 
opening like stomata 
along nerve-laden skin,
of tongues probing  
tasting  moistening  unveiling
revealing the voracious 
pulse and press of pelvis  
belly  
even neck, bared 
for the thin membrane of skin,
primordial as sound rising 
from ancestral marrow
formed of molten rock and sky-filled sea

before X marks the space 
within and between.

Thank you to the editors of HOT FLASHES: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.

Touch

poem & photo by Elizabeth
TOUCH

hands awaken 
stars in skin
till our palms
press peace
deep as breath

yet this snow-blind 
animal need for touch
shared by grooming apes
and dogs sleeping entwined
is rarely about sex 

but instead our primal need to know 
we are not stones tossed out to sea
as we breathe the same air
molecules shared
in this brief habitation of skin

Thank you to the editors of 5AM for first publishing this poem.

Dark in Light

photo by Elizabeth

DARK IN LIGHT


Wanted to show you the moon
but cruised off the wrong ramp
and wound up in a war zone
where there is no curfew:
men standing solo in the middle of the street
or huddled, talking beneath burned-out lamps;
				
wanted to show you the soccer moon
but drove down darkened roads with bars 
enclosing windows and doors,
barbed wire spiraling a hardware 
store and nursery—planks and daisies 
out of reach;
	
wanted you to count the seas
across that haloed orb
but drove alone 
through neighborhoods as treeless
as that dog-song moon;
beat-up cars driven 
beyond unmarked borders
pulled over by uniforms 
with clubs and guns,				
jagged tension cutting concrete air;
				
I want to know who 
declared this war of Americans
against Americans:
children peer from sheeted windows,
women hide behind hollow doors,
a man looks up from an empty street, 
each of us equal 
distance from the sun’s reflective sphere.

Thank you to the editor of Something Like Homesickness for first publishing this poem.

Día de Muertos

painting & photo by Elizabeth

THE CHOIR

I walk and I rest while the eyes of my dead
look through my own, inaudible
hosannas greet
the panorama charged serene
and almost ultraviolet with so much witness.
Holy the sea, the palpitating membrane
divided into dazzling fields and whaledark by the sun.
Holy the dark, pierced by late revelers and dawnbirds, 
the garbage truck suspended in shy light, 
the oystershell and crushed clam of the driveway, 
the dahlia pressed like lotus on its open palm.
Holy the handmade and created side by side, 
the sapphire of their marriage, 
green flies and shit in condums in the crabshell
rinsed by the buzzing tide.
Holy the light--
the poison ivy livid in its glare, 
the gypsy moths festooning the pine barrens, 
the mating monarch butterflies between the chic boutiques.
The mermaids handprint on the artificial reef. Holy the we, 
cast in the mermaid's image, smooth crotch of mystery and scale, 
inscrutable until divulged by god
and sex into its gender, every touch
a secret intercourse with angels as we walk
proffered and taken. Their great wings
batter the air, our retinas bloom silver spots like beacons.
Better than silicone or graphite flesh absorbs
the shock of the divine crash-landing.
I roll my eyes back, skylights brushed by plumage of detail, 
the unrehearsed and minuscule, the anecdotal midnight
themes of the carbon sea where we are joined: 
zinnia, tomato, garlic wreaths
crowning the compost heap.

 Olga Broumas 

Día de Muertos

Inception

poem & photo by Elizabeth

INCEPTION


She asks,
wants him 
to be the first. 
As if the other 
were a ripened peach,
easily bruised,
they time their movements
to the ancient 
pulse of 
hearts 
then
seas.

Sharp tears through
hidden flesh
steal her breath.
They stop,
begin again,
relentless clock counts towards curfew.

Soothed by his hot sweet breath,
she rests in his embrace—
linear time shifts to the relative distance
between innocence and experience—

she arches,
accepts whispers
fingers
lips
as he eases her through
surmountable pain.

Her chrysalis rips,
new life emerges:
    	the harsh sun
    	scent of clary sage
    	wings drying in a warm breeze. 

Thank you to the editors of Hot Flashes: sexy little stories and poems for first publishing this poem.

Gram

poem & photo by Elizabeth

DREAMING OF GRAM

It was the way her eyes rolled 

as she flashed her pack of cigarettes
while I was explaining the impact of 

environmental illness, as if anyone who 
acknowledged the body’s needs, who didn’t 

do what they wanted despite physical 
limitations, was a whiney little roach

as evidenced in her smoking while sporting
an oxygen tank for advanced-stage emphysema—

I’d had it with the family code of fuck-your-body-
till-it-drops exemplified by our matriarch so I

got in her emerald eye-shadowed face framed with
brilliant orange hair and said: I don’t like you and if you 

want me to feel anything positive about you when you die, 
you need to demonstrate a shred of decency now

then I stepped to the other side of the bed.

Perhaps she rose from where she’d 
crouched between bed and wall and left, 

but for me, she disappeared.

Thank you to the editors of riverbabble for first publishing this poem.