CONCATENATIONS

Row 1: ch 33, dc in 4th chain from hook and in each chain across (31), chain 3 and turn.

Cells dividing into hives multiplying into frequencies honeycombing into an intricate fretwork of networks and signals and towers until there’s no more here or there, only a sizzling grid of electric honey and the dizzying hum and drone of bees, bees, bees.

Phone buzzing under the pillow. Quiet golden murmur in the morning.

Row 2: dc in second dc from hook and across (ch 3 counts as first dc), chain 3 and turn.

Runner passes the baton in a relay race.
Dove-tail joint.
Knit 2, Purl 3.
Shifting limited omniscience.
Tongue and groove.

Row 3: repeat row 2.

Triangulate.
Trifecta.
Bouquet.

Row 4: sc in second dc from hook and next 3 dc, ch 6, skip 6 stiches, and dc in remaining stitches across, ch 3 and turn.

I dreamed I grew feathery moth antennae. Flew blind at night. Overheard it all. Felt everything. It was excruciating. Or do I mean it was exquisite?

Slip stitch.

I am HTML-ing together a web to trap myself.

I am making a bright net to catch me when I fall.

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CARTOGRAPHIES OF LIGHT

Frozen morning’s bedside lamp an intrusive klieg light slicing away sleep’s velvety privacy. Cold air rushing in through the window frame, shiver of snow outside. Blurred plume of car exhaust toreadors up in a lazy nebula spotlit underneath the alley streetlamp, drifts like tangled strands of hair into the thorny crocheted lace of bare trees.

Late afternoon light’s lazy drizzle palely honeycombing in. Sticky glitter braising the cat’s fur, sallow yellow striping floorboards, brush of shimmery butter basted on the bookcase.

Tungsten’s photons brightening in winter’s early fade-out; gas flame’s blue fandango; Coltrane’s sax a hot gilded bird tracing radiant orbitals.

The cool glow of this screen. These words burnished pennies refracted into an inverted beam and slide-projected onto the lens behind your retina: electric filament glittering along the optic nerve, sizzling upward where the light of your mind will coppersmith them into jingle and shine.

See how the reflected wedges of rapidly-dimming windows kiss the handblown glass into some kind of quiet incandescence?

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UNSPUN NOCTURNES

You dream your feet are tender and cold and bare. It is winter. You wear an ember-colored blouse. Someone is reading poetry. It isn’t like you to take off your shoes like this.

(Prism, nacre, calcite, aragonite, abalone, mother-of-pearl, spiral, whorl.)

Coin ricochets down in a metallic clatter, ropes shudder and creak, velvet shimmies up, and you slow dance in your clear glass fishbowl with your eyes closed. Center page for eight minutes, all languorous swirl and trope: sequin scales’ illusion, allusive fan of silk sleeves. Idee fixe with nowhere else to go.

At night, you shut the blinds against late afternoon’s too-early dark. You want to hold all the light inside. You don’t want to become a silver top unspun. You don’t want to be unribboned.

(Prism, nacre, calcite, aragonite, abalone, mother-of-pearl, spiral, whorl.)

Wait for morning, wait for the wind to please stop blowing because you are brittle paper palimpsest with words you can’t quite make out pressed down by a too-hard pencil on a torn-away top sheet: vastuary? unrinded? bromeliaphilia? n-ache-r? Wait for morning, wait for the wind to please stop blowing, wait for your chest to unclench enough to take another breath, wait for the weak-tea November light to come and lick the stubble fields into a quiet burnishing.

(Prism, nacre, calcite, aragonite, abalone, mother-of-pearl, spiral, whorl.)

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GEM CITY: A MIGRAINE DREAM

Coasting down foothills into Laramie. My father’s old gray Jeep: vinyled and squared, filigreed in lace cuffs of rust.

Rockies’ chilled crust thrusts up hard, distorting the horizon.

Perspective all askew: Mountains much too large and much too blue, looming up much too close too fast. I am not a child, but I slide back and forth in the middle of the front bench seat, knees jogging the gear shift. The parents in the car are not my parents. Alco’s cracked neon on the left closed down years ago. Lost effervescence of wind-bobbled balloons frantically bubbling in the no-longer-there car lot.

Clouds spill down off the mountains, twisting into dangerous, spiraling wraiths.

Are those tornadoes? I ask.

They flame in the too-loud wind like black dry ice, slivered with bright threads of lightning.

Is it war? I ask.

They dervish off the sagebrushed plains toward the road.

You have to stop. You have to pull over, I say. I’m not wearing a safety belt.

The sound of unfurling metal, burning, shattered glass, hot wind. Everything goes blank.

An eyelid blinks open to sunlight, emptiness, the heart-shaped white behinds of curious antelope retreating. Empty car, empty highway, everyone else gone. Mountains’ bright prong ringing an empty town.

Radio’s static crackle, then chipped advertisements, like faded billboards in the wind:

it’s Joe Albertson’s supermarket . . .

on a sesame seed bun . . .

you’re in good hands with All State . . .

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IMPRINT

Only the day before, air bristling with Japanese beetles, all metallic ping and pinch.

Grasshoppers Jiffy Popping under the sky’s blue aluminum dome.

On the walking path, one of the last of the dog day cicadas stranded on its back and rattling its dry gourd of a body until I righted it. Small mechanical wind-up toy’s stutter and twitch.

All of this rescinded after a single morning’s chilled rain. Leafprints scored into asphalt. An immolation of orange and yellow burnings stilled to silhouetted ash and char.

Imprint of your body fading too quickly from my bed.

Is it an erasure, or is it a swallowing?

Or perhaps the turning of a purse inside out to reveal the silky lining?

Leaves glisten. The drizzle-slick dock shines. Sky an uncertain pearling of abalone.

And yes. I have been turned utterly inside out.

And so I ask you, what other choice is there, if not to give oneself up to the rain–to glisten, shine, and pearl into this very absence, this ache, this lambent and indefinite quiet?

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“ARE YOU GONNA KEEP ON PEELING ME?”

A bouquet of prickles and stings:
you weigh each thistled scale one
by one, drizzle with euphemisms:
creamy, nutty, fleshy, green.

What will happen when I’ve gifted
all my nettles away? What’s left?
Steamed flower to scoop clean out.
Edible, pressure-cooked heart.

You’re plucky and buttery,
ruthless in your mathematics
of extractions and subtractions.
A Fibonacci series of unpetaling.

(Can you squeeze a lemon on me?)

Seismic shifts, and things unhinge:

Relax with ice and slit the resistant
muscle, or steam open the shell.
Do not pry, and do not suck.
(The ice, the knife, the glove . . . )

Earthworms rise to the surface,
throb and bake in the fierce light.
Mole rats head-drum their portents.
Catfish thrash in a tumult of silt.

O harmonic tremor, o earthquake!

O, sweet giant!

O beautiful tsunami!

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OMFG!

I just got slapped
with a wet salmon – really –
I haven’t updated
since people stopped clapping
and Tinkerbell died.

You would not believe it!
My hands were chopped off
and I was waiting for bionics.

My bad . . .

I’m swilling chardonnay
with only your readership
as life preserver, distracted
by the shiny, a delightful
mistress to every Lost Boy
who crosses my path.
My day is filled with
fluorescent light –
from 4:55 a.m. until I see
my beloved’s 10000
text messages, and I am
beyond drunk
most of the time.

(It will be fun fun fun
till they take my TBird away.)

I swear on the bones
of my ancestors to update
you with my nefarious
activities at the first chance.

No, really!

And I will write more
to certain you’s . . . ?
But it might not be you,
in particular,
who I write to. . . .

(A post from The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator, contracted virally from Dr. Medusa.)

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WORD CLOUD

I made a Word Cloud out of one of my newish prose poems over at Wordle.

I sort of love the depaysment of seeing all of the unraveled words floating about in the ether like that.

You can see it here:

Prose Poem Word Cloud

Go make your own!

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MY DEAREST, MOST BELOVED AND ESTEEMED FRIEND, ANGEL, GUPPY, AND ROOT CELLAR:

I am joyous to tell you that one million, five hundred thousand calamata olives are ready for deposit in a Peruvian cave marked by a crop circle of silently humming signifiers.

Fruit bats anxiously await your transmission of authorization via sonar and will alert the appropriate algorhythyms to initiate the transfer of importunities.

Your most urgent reply, wrinkled in brine, is desired.

For I have looked upon your profile and wondered: Who is this dreaming axolotl? This squash-court Jezebel? How could this Haz-Mat honey come to be?

For I am a most sincere exiled princess of a defunct thumbtack empire, in need of thong laundering and a Visa Gold card. Or no . . . for I am a kidnapped prince held hostage by the narrative feed of a Tasmanian novel cartel. Or no . . . for I am a roller derby queen on the skids. Or no . . . for I am [just tell me who you want me to be].

Do you wish for the increased omniscience created by a full head of cabbage? Do you wish to meet available Winnebagos in your hometown of Mandan, North Dakota? Do you ever wish for a larger turkey baster?

I will most anxiously await your Yield sign. I will not blink until I hear from you. I will hold my breath like an eager cup full of jangling quarters in a smoke-filled room.

Hurry! You have won the nunnery! The pottery! The cutlery!

Hurry! Time is running out.

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SWALLOWED UP

Young swallow trapped in the upstairs landing by my back door.

At first, it was only an unidentified disconsolate rustling among the plastic sacks. Then a glimpse of tired wing. Pull back a box and a panicky twittered swooping around the bare light bulb before coming to rest on the wall. Something almost bat-like about the flat cling to vertical and the photographer’s cape of dark wing.

It explained why the cats had been repeatedly clustering about the back door on and off throughout the day.

I propped open the door to the outside on the landing below, hoping the fresh air might guide the swallow back out. I tried to usher it down the stairs, but there was just more awful ricochet and bash.

Finally, I just scooped it up in a washcloth and took it outside myself. Scared to hold too tight or not tight enough. Small blunt head swiveling between my thumbs.

Outside, I set it down in the damp lawn. It seemed disoriented for a moment, but then launched itself crookedly into the pending storm.

How strange it was to hold something that wasn’t meant to be held.

What a relief it was to be able to finally let it go.

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