a gunpowder trail, sinuous
across the wooden plank floor sparkling
down the stairs, scarring the runner, under
the wainscot and around
the corner, you know
this trail
dropped
from a hole
somehow bored
in the wooden keg and then
he
comes along
and lights
it
from the other end
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Forty-Three
And What Happens to the People Who Come Into Our Lives and Try to Love Us
I’ve been crawling your body for weeks, seeking
scars, a signature left behind, some sort
of split where the shrapnel went in and did the skin
heal over before the metal
was removed. I’ve been trying hard to still your eyes long
enough to let me crawl inside, but I cannot quite make it before
they shift, flash, or blink tossing me off, making me grab for something
to steady, check around for someone watching
me navigate the displacement of ground underneath, my rubber knees, bare
feet grasping the stingy rubble crumbling. Crying through smoke surrounding, grey tear streaked face barely able to breath. This place is too thick
with history, more a photograph in a book of me peeping
now through a window, some people on a beach, sand in creases, twisted
hair, honey skin smoothed from wind and abrasion, smiles rising and fading, windblown loneliness, the ache for life to begin again where it’s now
stagnant and peeling, the same since last spring. Honey, I’m trying to draw
myself back to safety, inside again to the stubble on your chin, the pulsing
of your tongue, or the soft v between your fingers, but the stillness outside this reality is killing me and the wind wont stop howling your name, telling me if I cut you open I could catch a glimpse of infinity.
Boundless
As the ardent moon approaches, hot and bright, melted stars smeared
behind her, instigating the night, wrecking her orbit, confusing
the seas. Should she do her best to calm herself? Smooth her dress, apply
fresh gloss, sit and pose for her eternal painting?
As the ardent moon approaches, fervent and perfervid, throwing sparks
now having scraped off her silver, she’s ruining geometry and algebra,
serpentine,incongruent, misaligned with the planets. Should she pause
and adjusther coordinates? Hold her hands and feet just so as she avoids
blinking too much in the camera flash bulbs?
As the ardent moon approaches, life swells, rises, and overflows in anticipation
of her kiss, but she only knows how to love with her fists, brushing ants from her planet, she is visibly disgusted by the crawling and clawing, striving
in the desperate attempt
to stay alive.
Of course she wants love. She is trying frantically to remember how it was she
came to be, understand the concept of freedom, stitch together the touch
of a lover’s hand, shake the bitter vagueness, make mist solid, grasp the throat
of camaradarie, squeeze tears from the soft, downy comfort
of all that was once cool and green.
jenifer.wills 