Doll Maker

Girls line up to join
an assembly line
of blank faces eager
for the red stain
of blushes and lips.

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Infestation

Doubt is an ant
that carries more than
its weight and craves
the sweeter crumbs.

Doubt is a bite
that stings at first,
then craves to be itched
before making you bleed.

Doubt is a swarm
that leaves enough
green things to live on
but not enough to thrive.

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The Potter (Italian Sonnet)

His dripping hands reach for the formless lump
he pulls from a cool hollow in the earth
as if he can already see its worth.
But it is only clay, a filthy clump
of dirt, and still his hands begin to pump
the slab, reviving hands around its girth.
Each push is a resuscitating birth
of shapes creating shapes inside the jump
start of a fading pulse and dying heart.
The spinning whirr is silent as the wings
of little hummingbirds and humming flies.
The pressure of his fingers leave a mark
upon the clay and other softer things.
The artist’s touch is where its value lies.

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Yellow Girl

They sit in neat rows,
each pair of light eyes,
painted on by the deft
hand of a factory, framed
in perfect halos of gold hair.
I am the other, without
a fabricated piece of me
to cherish because the me’s
on the shelf don’t look like me.
I was made of darker things,
made rare by living
close to the light.

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Mosaic

She bends at the waste
to pick up shards, small
bits of color scattered
like forgotten ashes
of the dead resurrected
into tesserae. She sees
where each broken edge
should join another to
make something new.

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In Case of Emergency

Run, do not walk,
to the nearest escape.
Row far from the undertow
that is sure to follow this wreckage.
Don’t scan the other rafts
because I won’t be there.
Don’t pretend to call out my name,
I know it tastes wrong on your tongue
like everything else about me.
You will get out alive.
That is why you sleep so close
to the deck, so far from me–
in case of emergency.
I will not leave a vessel
that we built together
and filled with wide berths
of promises, even though
they are empty now.
I will go down with the ship.

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Artemis

His hands are tied,
caught in threads
invisible to naked eyes.

She knocks her
bowed fingers against
the taught strings.

They move together
in a lissom dance
of marionette hearts.

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How to Grow Roses

Throw away the gloves
and get used to the feel
of dirt in your wounds.
There will be blood.
Why else would
you plant roses?

You need the thorns
to make your toil worthy,
to mark your very skin
with piercing significance.
The beauty of the bloom
is birthed in the sting.

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Sevenling

Her face is a display case
of curio smiles and other
porcelain knick-knacks.

Behind the peerless glass
is a stationary parade
of hand-painted trinkets.

The inscription reads do not touch.

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Erm, I wrote this posthaste…
Posthaste

You ask why I am always the first to look away.
I say it is the way of the guilty. We can’t peer too long
into reflective faces because we are spinning tops–
taking a turn on surfaces made of precious things
but faltering without fail until we tilt off the axis.
I look away because I am afraid of falling.

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Nonplussed

We are scratch paper.
There is no partial
credit for the sincere
scrawls and half
truths that explain
how we arrived
at the wrong answer.

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Hold That Pose

In case we don’t make it,
I want to remember
that you were smiling
as we stood at the edge
of something wonderful,
that it was your hands
pushing our love
out of the nest
to see if we
could fly.

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Empty Desk
for those who know what it is to pick up the pencil after putting it down

Once, I loved the feel of a pencil in my hand,
how it coaxed callouses like wrinkles
following lines of old laughter,
how every Tin Man i who ever
wished for a heart, got one.

Those days were replaced by erasers
earnest to remove every mistake,
but letters and words leave impressions
on the page even after the black
is rubbed away.

Now the pencil is too sharp.
It accuses me with points straight
as gallows raised in rows of perfection.
They watch me with the beady eyes
of dolls left too long in the package–
never to hold, never to play–
only collected.

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Centrifuge

We spin faster
to separate
our blood
into denser
affairs,
making room
for light
and lighter
things
to float.
We bend
to skim
brightness
into our
cupped
hands.

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Coming Home

You avoid the rows of plastic chairs
to pace the terminal as if chasing
the remnants of last night’s dream.
Ignore the sound of landing jets
and happy homecomings–it’s not
for you, yet. You will not be home,
not really, until your heart is back
in your arms, for good this time.
You put it in her keeping
the moment you saw her eyes
bright with a smile undiminished
by rows of plastic cribs
and other babies crying
for arms that do not come.
Your arms twitch with phantom
need to hold her, to give her
your name and the promise of years
in exchange for scraped knees,
first days of school, and drawings
of a colorful family on the fridge.
The distant things are there, too–
the letting goes, the giving away,
the generations that begin with her
arrival.

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Last Kiss

I need you like addiction needs a reason to breathe.
This chest, these remembering lungs dare to float
to you where the air is dangerously thin. Each kiss
is an imprint of ridges and valleys pressed across
the topography of my face. There is no border
or boundary to stop the blazing trail.

Prompt from Poetic Asides.

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Building

He sprawls on the floor,
surrounded by plastic bricks
that carry him to a world
without wall-to-wall carpeting
or time outs or taller people
leaning down to speak
into his upturned face.
Instead, he bends the walls
and paints with sweeping
strokes in limitless patterns
of anything goes.

Photo prompt by Jen Reyneri at Word Traveling.

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This is my halting attempt at prose poetry with strong nods to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime and C.S. Lewis’ Dawn Treader.

Albatross

I used to pretend that I was different, that I wasn’t born with it around my neck, but the smell of death was strong as hell, stinging my eyes like sinking ships. Through a blur of salt and pain, I saw the shadow of another pair of wings stretching east to west (or maybe top to bottom?) across the blackened sky. They reached with hands that knew my name, knew the whitewashed hollow I’d become. He took away the dying things, the cages I had fashioned into shiny things, to plant something beautiful and green inside the ashes.

Prompt from Poetic Bloomings: choose a bird and make it the focus of your poetic piece.

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