Archive for May, 2009
Poetry: “To Virginia Woolf,” by Paulette Guerin
Drifting down a long trip to the sea
Silk sash swelled with all she did not write
Then dips the pen’s sharp silver beads
In ink pools, oily spills, across veinless leaves,
Each pocket of rocks holding tight
Drifting down a long trip to the sea.
She chose the tides, a moon guide, not to bleed,
Marches to the river waist height,
Then dips the pen’s sharp silver beads.
She sifts the sand and steals a stone for every need
She has to carry into the night,
Drifting down a long trip to the sea.
Starving, on her own hunger she feeds,
Then lays down the arms of her last fight,
Then drips the pen’s sharp silver beads.
She signs the slip, leaves it for him to see.
Strangely grinning lips, now her body seems so light,
Drifting down a long trip to the sea,
Then drips the pen’s sharp silver beads.
Poetry: “Leaves in the Moon,” by C.L. O’Dell
Light unfolds itself
in the dark of your veins,
in the deserted
cold of midnight
when my eyelids
jig for fish,
where skin separates
the fragile seasons.
I am asleep,
curled-up with the spiders
and a strange scent
of mold.
You’re a wet leaf hanging
in the thin belly of the moon;
I reach for the door to grab your hair
by the invisibility of it.
A sink full of applauding glass and metal
rolls my shoulder,
a dog’s rib-cage wedged
between my legs.
A flock of birds
move like thought
in the breaks of your voice,
prancing through my temple –
a shotgun blast of pellets
floating to the surface of a pond.
I moan and smear my forehead, a dying flower,
reaching for a dark hole,
wishing that you would
come and dream with me.
Fiction: “Prometheus” by James Henschen
“I don’t want to know what it was ‘like’, I want to know what it was.”
When the detective with the crooked jaw and prom king blue eyes says this to me, I want to punch him in the throat. Apparently, he lacks an appreciation for metaphor because what I said was “it was like a symphony of orange and white, dancing, mocking us as we watched our life disappear into little black specks of nothingness.” I know, it was a bit elaborate, but I couldn’t help myself. What it was; was a fire. One that I started, but he doesn’t know that. He doesn’t ask his arrogant questions because he suspects anything. I am flawless and practiced. He asks his questions because he is simple. But I still want to punch him in the throat. Instead I look at him, calm and confused.
