THE BEAD PROPHECY

a. Since Miss Lavinia unpacked that doll from its box, dispatched across the wide Atlantic by Queen Victoria’s bespoke toymaker, the wandering ghosts it summoned had had the temerity to push me into pig muck, while one vile spirit wound about my sister’s wrist like thorny sweetbrier.

NATURE

a. The ‘je ne sais quoi’ of a late autumn morning. Erratic breezes crackle in dry stems. Haze lifts its veil from the lake. Whomps of snowy swan wings defy gravity and the weakling sun. A finish and a promise of new seasons sealed with a birdsong of resurrection. (Photo: kingfisher on pole.)

b. Ko was a male drill of the primate kind, his bottom an extra-vibrant pink that set him apart in the dangerous job of luring hunters thru the ruined habitat: trees harvested, pestilential mangrove swamps, an eerie absence of bird and bug chitter. His troupe was starving.

c. Owl’s shriek obviated stealth so it was down to feline speed, only Skunk was drunk and also a stocky fellow with a distinct air about him. Darn it, supper had bolted and now he’d have to go cap-in-hand to Mama’s woodpile for a slice of life-lesson pie.

LITERARY/ART HISTORY

a. T. S. Eliot. Sedate affairs, our cocktail parties. Gin oils our memories of bygone affronts, of our steadfast honor in the teeth of wifely melancholia, stubbornness, and pernicious habits. We fervently raise our glasses to the madhouse doctors who mute and restrain the wretched women.

b. Renaissance Theatre: The somewhere mattered not a whit to the wayfaring players, masters in the art of persuasion & chicanery. In each town of their vagrant route, they trod the boards to amuse an audience w/ bawdy farce while young cut-purse Rafe, dressed for the role of Whore, accosted the fat aldermen.

c. Dickens had them by their twisted metaphors: Oliver alone and hungry but posh enough to know a fish from a butter knife; the Artful Dodger wearing his craft over a heart of gold; & Fagin embellished with revulsion, rags, and false bonhomie.

d. Invincible was Ozymandias in his own mind, & in the desert built a colossal monument of his image, now broken by time and forgetting, tho’ his carven words persist. If we look upon the sneering lips that spoke them we despair, for he is the future promised.

e. Over a pint at the Bellicose Raven, Will dips a quill in Marlowe’s blood & writes “the crappy crow doth bellow for revenge.” The tavern sign croaks “look here mate,” but he ignores it. The critics murder Hamlet’s tragedy in the 1603 edition of Time Out in London.

f. Seamen’s worship was compulsory in the bowels of the wrecked Pequod, & self-flagellation with baleen strips the measure of our faith. Twas Ishmael what trimmed and lit the wick that drew forth the ghost of Ahab that we prayed might perish in the Moby-oil flame.

g. Tis a dark and stormy night and cold withal when Hamlet busts into Ophelia’s closet stuffed with frocks–oops–prayer books and poppets. ‘A play’s the thing,’ sez he, ‘to catch the conscience of … that chap what killed my dad.’

She claps. ‘O joy. A musical.’ (49)

h. In a raging tempest Caliban gathers rice before it washes away. He’s a vegan pacifist while Prospero dines on mooncalf dropped from the moon-jumping cow, a soft white veal easy on his teeth. To resolve the monstrous Hegelian impasse, Caliban must turn to murder and mastery.

h. Shelves of the museum gift shop tremble at lights-out. Picasso’s bust humps downstairs and Van Gogh’s saws off its plaster ear. Courbet’s print frames him with maroon velvet while Manet and Gauguin models flirt coyly from the sidelines. Dirty dead white artists recall the time no one gave a fig. (50 Modified).

j. Velvets are the gorgeous soul-suckers of Gaiman’s storyology but the mystery is why he didn’t warn us about the worst offender–mint-based Poly Sateens. Clingy & bristling with static, they take but a moment to reduce a victim to insensible jelly.

k. Out of the amaranthine dusk he comes trailing clouds of glory. I close my eyes to hold the miraculous mirage on my retinas so that when I die he’ll be found curled asleep under my eyelids, all harms cancelled, my child come home. (Ref: Wordworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.”)

l. Older and saturnine the way she likes men, he reads thrillingly from Byron in his velvet voice. She learns the secret of his enduring tan long after he’s fallen under her sway, as if she’s a wafting palm and he the ripe fruit fallen and split at her command for her delectation.

m. The obfuscation of latinate words, clever conceits, and piercing metaphors of the poets confound her. A poem’s not a puzzle but the capture of life’s essence in a fleeting spray of sound, color, & movement, a quetzel in flight, or true love treading autumnal leaves underfoot.

n. I began in the stables where I curried the blue stallion of the god Equus and later roamed the cosmos on a team of pink unicorns to barter with fire-dragons, so rich in diamonds. Only those cold and eternal stones could please Equus after he was so cruelly blinded by a boy. (48)

o. Miss Marple’s optimistic about finishing the jumper before her nephew’s birthday. He’s off the grid in LaLa Land chasing a unicorn herd, but he phones telepathically. ‘Aunt Jane, do come. There’s been a horny murder most foul.’

WHIMSY/FAIRY

a. Imperfect of form, a tripartite creation of human, hawk, & koi, she strives to make the most of her allotted span, in turn a flyer in azure heights or swimmer in green deeps, and in between she struggles in the sanatorium to paint-by-numbers w/ fin and talon.

b. The cells fused & multiplied before the lens & the genetic mix of E. coli, mosquito, and tsetse fly crawled from the petrie dish. His thumb flexed over the winged chimera, a self-delivering lethal weapon. Either way, it was murder. (40)

c. Full Moon hollers in joy then waves to her cosmic BFFs. She zooms earthside & burns lakes to hissing craters as lover query her absence. She lets the tides roil and rides the wayward crests. Until Gravity drags her home & spanks her bum red.

d. ‘Unlikely story,’ the cop says. I open my garage piled high with corpses. ‘See, I kill my darlings and they fall out of my WIP. We had fun, y’know?’ ‘A book burning’ll get rid of them … The dragon topples on him. Ooh. I never wrote a whomped-flat cop mystery before. (50+)

e. Wings lamed by thorns, her heart a tom-tom, she scrabbled up the scree bare yards ahead of Hunter & his hound whose fangs slipped thru fae flesh like razors. Trapped atop the cliff, she sang for her vassals. In fury & thirst they came for blood.

f. The shifting silver sheen of a myriad fae wakes the girl hiding in a rowboat, nameless victim escaped from a thriller and fallen into a fantasy. The long diaphanous wings of fae cut her face like nails, but she expected trouble. Mace will dull their shine.

g. Samwell is yanked from a sweet reverie over his abundant harvest when he sees that every grape has been gnawed. His head pounds. Blasted fairies, glittery layabouts w/ shameful sexual practices and a bellyful of addictions. His wine is gonna knock their socks into migraines. (51)

h. Princess Lilac’s a crucible of pique & perfume. Her Redwood army dwarfs her, her Boxerwood war-dogs are lovable scamps, & her Jack pines wink at her. How she longs to blaze bright! Witch Elm obliges, and Lilac becomes the 1st ornamental bush-comet to eclipse the sun (39).  

i. I read of demons, vampires, & ghosts unleashed from sanity & strayed into sleeping & waking dreams despite electrified & barbed fences. Stunned, torn, & raging, the phantasms bleed ink from poetic fingers. Little psalms of horrific vulnerability.

j. Wildfire abated but the habitat ruined, woodsy folk migrate to the city. They touch whiskers before they separate: foxes head for trash piles; chipmunks shelter in watermelon rind, and rabbits dig up a football field. Fawns Mo and Flo kick it up in heavy traffic.

k. Frog jumps from the stewpot & somersaults into the obscurity of a dust bunny, actually Charlotte’s extra-tacky web in place to catch the roly-poly Pig when he jumps from the hot stock. Frog blurps ‘Go.” Wilbur makes it but crackles his backside on a flaming burner.

l. A witch mixes a cauldron of romance with dream, lavender, moonlight and wine, an elixir of love she doles out by the thimbleful to the sad virgin, that wistful wife, or a lonely widow. Its success is indisputable for others, but if she sipped–an instant replay of Salem.  

m. A unicorn marbled by an evil spell senses a step soft thru gloaming’s promise. A weed-strewn water nympth trailed by mute swans kisses his stone cheek. Set me free, he cries with no sound. She drapes his horn in weeds and lo there’s water and he’s a seadragon new born (image). (40+) 

MISCELLANEOUS

a. Whatever the science of it, she’s lived for millennia & saved the residue of each joy & danger inside fragments of leaf or linen. 1st, the bundle filled her arms, then a barrow, now a wobbly grocery cart. Unwrapped, a shred of the past comforts her w/ hot tears. (42)

b. My kid’s eyes start leaking but the rain bleeding from her skin worries me most. She wakes on a soaked mattress, puddles on the floor. Doctors can’t treat her: she’s a water nymph not sick. In winter we hurl snowballs out her window & cheer w/ every target hit. (42)

c. The synapses dilly-dally, chanting about vitamins and brain-strengthening exercises. I reach into my cortex for a thread of knowledge mastered and preserved w/ mothballs. The catalog spins. Data cackles as it slips off and hides. Guess I’ll google it. (50)

d. Their banner of arcane symbols furled and unfurled without a breath of wind as the invaders’ darts each found and stilled a living heart. Bravery was an ideal defeated, and the survivors decamped to the familiar perils of the swamp.

e. The antique bangle in the shop window is hers from lives past, the silvery form mutated but the magic unmistakable. The wearing of it bestows pure joy but early death. The dying forgotten, she remembers thrilling parties and her darling lovers. She considers spending rent arrears to reclaim it. The kids tug on her sleeves and pull her down the street. (46)

f. The fault in our stars becomes euphoric reality when it vibrates the heavens into motes of ageless what-was, sweet showers of perfumed knowledge and untrammeled hearts. How deep our faith in that moment before we too enter the cosmic dance. Image. (51)

g. We murdered our planet by poison, cruelty and neglect and didn’t bat an eyelash at mortality stats or species extinctions. Thus, we’ve devolved into post-organic trash, our elements colliding and recombining at fate’s whim, abandoned to the absence of free will. 

CLICHE TOWN

a. Trite’s Reality is chock full of balloons marked with winking eyes. Mr. Trite turns catalog pages for the young couple new to town.

He says, ‘Here’s a block on Main Street you’ll need to go round a few times; lover’s lane with a permanent full-moon set-up.’

‘What about starter homes?’

‘Yep. All sold with a black lab and l.5 kids.’

b. –Fishbowl’s a town going places. Yessir. Precious little unemployment & schools produce astronauts like there’s no tomorrow. 

–Isn’t it bizarre there’s only one industry?’

–That’s on our mayor. He’s repairing his spacecraft before ICE gets wind of him.

c. In the safe zone, algorithms had assessed the risk of all behaviors likely to promote injury or death. Children, cars, sports, & alcohol were banned. Diet & exercise were prescribed. Despite the absence of weapons, the death rate held steady at 100%.

d. Elsewhere was a family trap of 7000 trees, acres of unblemished lawn, and 2 cars in every picket fence. Alcohol, opening of closets, public airing of dirty linen, & harsh words were banned. But across the track, the drug lords & speakeasy madams made up for it. (50+)

e. Cliche-Town’s rehabbing its infrastructure, signposting roads less traveled with vista lookouts over the slough of despond, restoring burned bridges stone by sooty stone, rod by warped rod of Chinese steel, and raising the roof on a new museum of twitter antiquities.

CLONE STORY:

a. Eaze blunts the anxiety & I sack out, a level B miner on my 15th cloning & no rebel. Tho genes do go rogue they say. My Sensitive spoons with me; this Matt Model favors my ex-husband whose genes perished on Homeworld. Matt’s AI’s corrupted but I’m game.

b. The shipbound High Lord provides his rare-earth miners w/ every necessity. Much beloved are the opportunity trees whose giant bubble fruit allows any daring soul to enter & be lofted into his awesome presence. As his emissaries, they rule the galaxy.

c. Nitric acid couldn’t bit thru her boots and survival gear lay heavy on her back. No way to move fast under the night’s pelting rain but she needed shelter before sunrise, before the scent of petrichor rose from the wasteland & the sun rendered her a column of ash. (54)

d. Bees extinct, the land was one unending scar of grit and we did terrible things to each other to survive. The hybrid robo-bees gave us hope & we threw parties to celebrate the bounty. Until our kids disappeared, live hosts to hellish bee larvae.

e. AsteroidZ to Homeworld: Emergency! Glory holes everywhere are erupting with molten au. Devastating loss of miners.

Homeworld to AsteroidZ: Production bonanza you say?

AsterodZ to Homeworld: But the dead miners?

Homeworld to AsteroidZ: They’re old batch clones. We’ve upgrades waiting in the wings.

AsteroidZ to Homeworld: So, you take this as a win-win?

f. The composer-architect’s innovative Symphony-Sphere was an imposing AI-driven orchestra-in-one. But the instrumental confluence amplified its habitual dissonance, and the impact was lethal. A glorious agony of total annihilation. (40 plus)

g. The dwarf planet teeters on the rim of the Kuyper Belt, a bleak prison for cloned miners fortified to live a centuries-long orbit before disposal. The laborer’s shift is torturous, but the honeyed bliss of relief is readily available with brothel-bots.

h. The dark period of Dwarf X’s lunar cycle stirs up thrill-seekers, and the Cosmic Govt preemptively sends out new clones. All murders and bone-headed adventuring occurs then but the clone slaves know their genes are immortal when they seek solace in riot and mayhem.

i. Collections from Earth’s beautiful people created clone lineages named for the founders: Streep, Jackson, Bloom, and so on. The esthetic choice worked to suppress stamina, hardiness, and sheer cussedness, and whole lines crashed before genetic tinkerers could restore stem-cell primitivism.

j. In black hole exploration, ship sensors record while volunteers provide ballast. They’re mainly flight-school rejects, tho roaches and nautili tag along. They’re ace survivors but not exactly lucid about the triggers for human mass hysteria and mayhem.

k. Clones mining vital au in Europa’s sea passively accept their Hobbsian fate until an Earthborn ally extends hope in a simple pill that renews the epigenetic blueprint of human emotion, not least the taste for vengeful brutality.

l. When coffee disappears from shelves, the au miners storm the PX w/ pickaxes and sledgehammers. The furor promises extensive property damage. Clones are cheap. Concrete is not. The Commander deploys instant crowd control with a vampiric mat of fibrous sea sponge.

EPIGENETICS:

a. Bonfires of the slaughtered bodies smoldered, smoke impenetrable, & stink so foul & otherworldly Zara had no name for it. Whipping movements caught her eye, for where fire failed, human flesh was become ground zero to alien terror. –

b. Zara’s energy is low, and Mom rushes her to Dr. ***, a hero medic of WWIII whose care is exceptional but whose telomeres are fatally short. She analyzes Zara’s bio samples in her lab, diagnoses epigenetic distress, not the wasting plague! And prescribes hormones.

SHORT MYSTICAL/POSSESSION:

a. Panto season draws all homeless emotions but by far the keenest is Anguish, the audience so caught up in the razzle-dazzle absurdity the target is unaware of the osmosis of possession. Hoping the kids are asleep, Mary unlocks the door to a blood splatter horror.

b. Shadow exchange began as a children’s tag game and developed into a lovers’ ploy to engender romantic delirium. In the ensuing collapse of that natural bondage, lost & amorphous shadows bonded with their own kind. Now they mass wherever lights are dim and swamp the unwary passer-by with their fathomless dark grief.

c. A novelist wrote her as flotsam on the human tide, a lump of ambergris w/ a fecal tang instead of cetacean perfume, offensive and risible. Raging, she wrote. Her tragic history a bestseller, and, smugly, she began her next book, re-writing the novelist as a fat dangling modifier.

d. Advances in ectoplasmic surgery made apparitions almost indistinguishable from living people – the result a population of chagrined half-beings straddling a dead/undead liminality. They make a living charging a stiff toll for passage either way.

e. Wind hurled a furious rain at the casement, but at her vanity Lady Obelus, transfixed by her face, ignored the warning. Her mirror like a giant Petri dish had divided and replicated her features until she was a veritable plague of ladies with patched and powdered faces. (gif of image)

f. Exultation and celebration as she types END. Time to curry favor from the arbiters of the publishing zeitgeist. Yes, that plague pit of scorn. Already morbidly infected w/ dread, her opus burst into flame under the jaundiced eye of an intern. A pass? (book burning gif)

HOME:

a. Coal-fire warmth & a pall of cigarette smoke w/ news buzz on TV. Dad lights up & watches a newscaster while I’m in an armchair, legs wrapped around Mam in front. My cheek rests on the Persil-scented cotton of her dress as, one by one, she snips my toenails.

b. A universe of hurts gone by, I take your hand, veined but capable, while your sensory faculties falter, and we shuffle to the idling car, your ankles thickened and spine bowed. Your stoic isolation/solitude is a grief to me, my mother disenfranchised from opportunity, poetry and wonder. (50)

c. His early onset dementia collapses his personality but makes him smile to see his wife. He eats oranges from her hand, his sour green apples forgotten. She enjoyed her children when they were babies, and this virtual infant compensates for years of his hard drinking and neglect. When he dies of pneumonia, she snubs any who say it’s a blessing. (47)

d. I always liked virtual reality, stories of me but never where I am nor who you think I am. I inhabit a figment who stamps her flamenco heels on her enemies, who rides a blazed stallion over virgin prairie. Who calls to you from the shadows.

GHOST STORIES:

a. EVICTION: Missy is quick in the figurative sense, her twin sister dead, head-shell cracked like a soft-boiled when Missy pushed her downstairs 50 years ago. Missy & the ghost dwell in bitter acrimony in an apt in Papa’s house, where he haunts the upper floor bordello.

b. THE KILLING: The vivid bustle of daily life had dimmed in an instant to dreary gray, a sense of sleepwalking thru a bladed mist, moist & cutting. Shrouded and hurt, she wound thru a cemetery’s store of forgotten tombstones until, at last, she lay in her own fresh-dug grave.

c. Waxy ghost girl crouches in a closet. She shifts position, her form grows insecure, bleeding into darkness. Will time erase her or can she come out? In the light maybe she can haunt the parents who never inoculated her against crayon-poisoning/against rainbow crayons.

c. WAR STORY: Jane’s a usurper in May’s kitchen, always making the tea while May leans on Ed’s legs as he sits in his khakis, rolled beret in an epaulette. He weeps and grieves for the dead. It’s thirsty work but he never gets a cup of tea. Jane says her dad died in the war, and May can’t help but wonder at the lie.

LOST DOG: A vicious stinging rain soaking thru your Burberry right off the bat, and you should’ve worn wellies, but the dog’s run off & he’s a dope in traffic. Hours you roam, find a shivering mat of fur in a shop doorway. Nose to nose, the static shocks you both.

PHILADELPHIA: That part of the city had been a white-flight casualty, w/ its vacant factories & lots overgrown w/ garbage trees & rubble. But even before gentrification the dour frontage of rowhouses might hide postage-stamp paradises of peony, river-stone pond, and gnarled wisteria.

NYC

Balloons burst & parade crowd dwindled, the colors of confetti hide in cracks. Hooded people w/o faces huddle in doorways while pigeons big as house-cats strut for crumbs under illuminated trees. A dead junco on a sidewalk serves as innocent omen of our just desserts.

SERVITUDE:

a. The guilty verdict condemns the blanket thief to transportation. Sickness and maggoty food near kill her, & in the colony it’s field labor ‘mid the slaves. But she dwells in paradise, cosseted by warmth & fragrance & gold-eyed Sampson’s nectar kisses.

b. i) With wise and gracious Aris, his father’s favorite concubine, the young sultan Omar inspects recent harem acquisitions. Aris summons from the chosen a thin Armenian purchased, Omar recollects, with a camel-load of carpets. He demurs & thumbs up the lip of an African wench to check her teeth. He freezes under the sky-blue gaze of the Armenian, overwhelmed heart and soul by her passion.

ii) The fetching beauties delivered annually to Khalid’s harem leave him cold. Let them prepare sweets, sweep tiles, or find joy where they might. He begs only the nectar of Estella’s willing lips. Tho his slave, she owns for all time the immensity of his love.

c. By law, whores’ newborns were left to wilt on the high altar, prey to the gods’ ravens. Eyes plucked out, a fair, fragile child wails so bitterly that the paradoxical gods soften, bestow new basilisk eyes, & teach him the way of retribution.

DARK FICTION:

a. The frogs were gone, now water fowl and song birds. Profound silence where once was a chorale of vibrant life. Here comes the miasma, carrion-foul, descending from a bruised & sunless sky. Its advance tendrils uproot the trees, and we smother the children before it takes us too.

b. All that’s left of him is the love patch. He sang in a band & girls crawled over him he was that cute, my kid, before the crash. Now I wheel him up to the lake & I survey the glassy stillness that is my life. If a movement ever catches his eye, I’ll let him go.

c. A peek at the 21st century & journo Angel vows to sit out time in Paradise w/ Milton & other serious poets, a Babel of tongues, but she has them all by heart. The Big Guy doesn’t notice the end of her coverage on war, slavery, pollution & corruption, he’s bingeing Netflex.

d. Mostly you ignore the aging husband rooster-pecking you in the kitchen as he re-arranges the dishwasher, buffs the silverware, and moans if you drink ‘his’ red wine, but the cure is pure simplicity. Coq-au-vin needs only a butcher’s knife and his wine. (40+)

e. She saw vividly how he used to race along the beach imprinted with the day’s footsteps & silvered by lingering dusk. He whipped sandpipers into looping flight & drew raucous screams from gulls watchful on the pilings. On & on he ran from her. Into the bittersweet shadows. (47)

f. In this epoch, we are prey and my inanimate bones will soon molder under layers of this river’s silt. The birds’ brouhaha at gray dawn clarions their hunger, but no raptors yet. A bare chance I’ll survive if I slip back into the water now. (pic).

g. I lingered when our gods fled the crowded slums & war-zones, for I tethered the rampant winds that turn Earth to face the Sun and the Moon. Now I’m frayed to breaking, & in their freedom the winds will sail me to the dying stars with the horseshoe crab and nautilus (52)

h. During the vicious storms, feral kids shelter with the villagers in the caves. Once warm and dry, the loners fight over food rations in the languages of fox, owl, and weasel. When mothers identify their own children snatched by the loony re-wilders, it’s always too late for a hug.

i. I sprint down checkerboard tile floor. Suspenseful sheet notes roil before my eyes. A clef falls on a vase beside my head & its shatters upwards to my feet. Along the floor/ceiling glints a sliver of light. A door. But there’s no handle, no escape from his dissonant compositions.

j. At the Remote Hospice for Incurables, all consideration is given to the cancer patients, so many taken each month by that deviance in the self, that home-grown warlord intent on total domination. At lunar epigee, the dying burn incense together and slam poetic elegies.

k. Seasonal witch Crooked Sal chews her last chunk of candied kid meat as she treks to the costume store to rent this year’s Halloween costume.

Pointy hat, stripy socks, seedy cloak: check.

Broomstick: unavailable.

Argh. Not the paragliding contraption again.

l. The demon wore the mask of Black Death, pustular and gaunt. Grinning and dancing, he led the merry conga line of Samhain celebrants, a pied piper spreading contagion by the flash and burn of fireworks shooting from his mouth, an horrific bid to marry the living with the dead.

j. The horror was not so much the space ships hovering over us but our survival. For food when the vegetation was masked by glass, and for air when the atmosphere collapsed. We slaughtered each other then. I guess they sheathed our bones in glass too.

k. His haunt a riverine cottage, Sweet Surrender, his art the impassioned coherences of mastery and submission with those he brought home to play. Tho none survivied, no corpose was ever disinterred, rather floated into dawn’s mauve oblivion (pic).

l. It was the accent, the yip for yap and the patrician elegance of his alabaster face that couldn’t be forgotten or lost like a someday photo in a kitchen drawer. His albinism wore him like an angel wears glory. I hear he took vows. Or killed himself.

PIRATES:

Jupes marvels at Captain Hamet’s magic that gathers the winds to blow his galley to a rich frigate or tame a turbulent tide and observes keenly. He’s cuffed across his ears for idleness but soon overmasters his master in the mysterious art of navigation magic.

Despite the name, the Jolly-Rogers were a dispirited lot, too timid to loot w/cannonball & cutlass, yet they lived like kings on salvage goods thanks to a plate-tectonics phantasm that endlessly shifted Shipwreck Reef & destroyed more vessels than Dany’s dragon.

A POTENTIALLY FALSE, HIGHLY ABBREVIATED, AND SORRY HISTORY OF ENGLAND

a. After a trial republic, Charles Stuart won 1st place in the game of thrones. Enamored of spaniels & courtesans, he caught the disease of world domination from his Portuguese in-laws. The infection was chronic tho the regime ended in a trifling squabble about a pope.

b. No more mystery about the fate of the Canting Bards, the horsehair-shirt clad, ever-fasting holy companions of the Crusaders. A Persian mass grave proves that their godly gift of heart-stopping poetry recitation was cut short by scurvy and starvation.

ROMANCE

a. A dating blurb. I cross out ROMANCE and substitute LOVE. A gull unfurls & soars as I wrangle dreams with inchoate words. I give up and sketch the guy I have in mind. A lone figure on the beach, bare feet, chinos rolled. A surge of surf near drowns me, snatches my notebook.

I wipe my face and open my eyes to a man’s hand reaching toward me. The image is ebbing with the wave, but here he is helping me stand up. Bringing love into my life.

b. The server stacked our plates neatly but crashed into the bushes w/ a clatter and an uprising of moths. Ben got up to help, but I sipped Frangelico, basking in the sultry suggestiveness of nighttime gardenia and our secret pleasures. (43)

c. Jolted from sleep, Lily spies a rising moon thru the green-bottle-glass window & hears Betty slipping from the flock-bed, new-stuffed w/ lamb fleece still sour from its urine wash. What sweet poetry will be writ for bold Betty naked as moon shadow in sultry night?

d. Independent of gravity, she sails from the horizon in her golden robe & startles a contrail of snow geese into honking cacophony. She spies the poet moon caressed by a cloud, her lover oblivious to her rising. She spreads out a lapis carpet & beckons.

e. The planets in alignment tempt lovers to defy the constraint of gravity and travel hand-in-hand, expectant & joyful, into night’s transcendent bliss. Up & up they float to burn for 1 brief but endless millisecond in celestial triumph.

f. She’s perched on a bar stool and hooks her hair repeatedly behind her ear while she explains HIS poem to her girlfriend. They think he’s a jerk, devouring them with his gaze. But he’s actually listening to her, the pour of her whisky voice in his ears, the elegant arrangement of word and pause.

g. A moon w/ cusps sharp as love’s urgency shines on the blank pages of our secret elopement. 

h. Sultry night, she lay on her unmade bed and fondled the amber cabochon, token of her ache, of her slow delirious suffocation. Her joys are buried beneath the agony of love curtailed–he the resin, she the moth. If only he would allow her to fly again. 

i. She concedes to night’s invitation, the garden’s saturation in frangipani, the breeze caressing her bare skin. A solitary organist in the old chapel romances her with grandeur, her heart with longing. She turns to the shadows. And waits.

j. He wears bargain-basement suits for work; she shops in consignment stores. His sole asset is a 1980 Mustang, her a real pearl earring found in the park. His desire is a hurtling meteor, hers a blazing comet. When they kiss, stars migrate to their eyes.

k. A shy bride and groom pray before they use rough bark to grate dry flowers and mix the powder with the waters of love and hope. To excise time’s wear on their joy, a priestess tattoos flowers of this amaranthine ink in the corners of smiles.

l. The endless drills and marches over, cannons silent, and mustard gas only a choking memory, the bloodied dead–young men all–rest in trenches or makeshift mortuaries, an armistice with fate while their sweethearts warm their beds with honor and grief.

m. On active duty, he devised a cut-and-paste game with the love letters of earlier separations. Last she received: ‘Love, Me. A long bar of dark cloud on the horizon.’ The last he read: ‘Kisses to infinity. Sand soft as ash. Me too.’

n. Promises broken on both sides, I lie abed in dawn’s dim light while sheeting rain lashes the window and gutters from the sill. Cocooned in heavy quilt and heavier saudade, I linger, half wishing for birdsong & Portugal as it was that spring (image). 

JUPES

In the foothills scarred by goat & sheep hooves, Jupes lights a fire that throws off choking smoke and fierce heat. Ajai tears into the pomegranate he’s filched for her then smiles with blood-red teeth. Sweet juice stains her chin. What he wouldn’t give to kiss her!

CRYSTALLINE

We Crystals are lab-created in this cancerous era, developed with extra organs to be mined and donated to our precious natural-born brothers and sisters. We’re fashioned double-wide and placid, but when our genetic siblings live through us we know love or something like.

THE LAND OF PREPOSTER

a. Trees gnawed to nubs by toothless beavers are a blessing for psychotropic woodbine hungry for sunlight and for everyday chipmunks who cache fall acorns in the rotted holes. If migrating unicorns horn in, chipmunks catch their tails for rides along the contrails of stars.

b. The new wave of edible poetry is fibrous, hard to digest and bloating, but mentally healthful, given its imagery of forest vista and grain field. The eggy prescursor is forgotten, leaving only yolk stains on men’s ties and gluey smears on breakfast toast anthologies.