screaming into the void

25

[pollinateme]

Your Unripe Love

By Paruyr Sevak

Your unripe love and my too ripe pain

were pushed together by Chance;

forced to travel side by side

by Circumstance.

And even when we sleep together,

knee to knee,

your unripe love and my red-ripe want,

like the edges of the legendary sword

of chastity,

keep us two cool blades apart,

your unripe love and my too ripe heart.

[pollinateme]

"I will tear the whole world apart if they ever hurt us again." But we would still be hurt, she thinks.

N.K. Jemisin - The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Trilogy)

[pollinateme]

From “The Double Standard of Aging” by Susan Sontag

[pollinateme]

The fantasy of capitalism as inevitable and rational collides with the fear that if it is, then anything--no matter how sacred--can indeed be bought and sold, with little fanfare.

Sophia Giovannitti - Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex

[pollinateme]

A Secret Third Thing

In a town

only named to disparage,

exists a type of tree

perpetual,

recalcitrant,

Evergreen.

When the clouds

decide to hide Mother’s rest

in a protective blanket,

most trees shed

their identities before

becoming abrasions

in the pale blue sky,

only adding contrast

to a monotonous atmosphere.

Being forever more green,

these trees still are blanketed,

only disengaged from a scene

that requires rest

not for self but submission.

For others grasping at what nature

forces them to release,

such an act would be nothing more

than preemptive death,

waiting for the snow to melt

and the ground to soften enough

to lift roots from soupy,

untouching Earth before

declaring they will not speak.

But for the Evergreen,

every needle is a note to another,

together singing the praise of

long sleep, recovery, and

a culture not concerned with rebirth

but only slow, sustained effort.

There is no need to regrow

what is not shed.

[pollinateme]

The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were reading, because my story, added to their minds, will then become a part of their thinking.

Jacqueline Harpman - I Who Have Never Known Men

[pollinateme]

The Hunted

When I don’t smoke I get to gamble on my dreams.

Sometimes I’m running my fingers through the mane of a beautiful stallion, lightly pulling through the knots and branches stuck there. The velvet of his nose tickles my neck. I never get to ride him, but the anticipation is enough.

More often, I’m running down a gravel road through a forest thick and brittle. The stones don’t crunch under my feet, in fact I’m slicing through the air without any impact on the environment around me. Sometimes I leap and find myself searching above the tall pines. I won’t see his face here, but maybe some sign will let me know that he has followed me: swaying branches, white smoke, the vibrations of a truck engine.

Eventually I reach the boarded up building that used to be a one-room school house. For a second I question if I’m late for the bus. The sun hasn’t burned off the morning frost but the bitch behind the wheel doesn’t care.

Except I don’t hide my bear-spray—I don’t even have bear-spray— in the bush behind the homemade mailboxes. Instead, I cross the road and break into the unknown.

Until you’ve explored the woods you wouldn’t realize how truly distinct all the trees are. Like people, you can count the blemishes that reveal a life lived; inconsistent bark, damp moss, burrows at the roots. My favorites are the trees that grow around other trees, hugging them with prickly limbs until eventually they stop growing all together.

Here, they repeat over and over in undescernable patterns. The same knots stare at me while I run past, sucking in the pollen slow dancing through the air.

The path begins to converge into itself; the trunks take on oblong shapes until I’m funneled where they want me to go. I’m floating through walls of brush otherwise only traversable by the knuckled knees of a moose. This is different than running.

I have broken into a circle of evergreens. The pines tickle my nose, the soft flesh behind my knees, the fear that the man behind me will catch me, rape me, and then tell me he loves me. Light refracts and redoubles upon itself until I am bathing in layers and layers of something so old I could be tasting its shadow.

For the first time, I do not run. I do not leap. I lay.

Long-limbed quadrupedal creatures emerge from the shadows, surrounding me. Oversized joints reveal their form where extensive, unkempt hair attempts to conceal it. I wish I knew what they were holding amoungst themselves. I was too busy watching Him.

Built like the other creatures, he stands on two legs. The underused front limbs atrophied until they dangle useless off his curved spine. At the end of each, a shiny steel hoof, cleaved down the middle. As he inches towards me, small rocks lodge themselves there. I feel the pain like an ache in my tooth.

Chin tucked, face bare, he stares at me, betraying nothing, so inhuman, so vastly different than the animals completing his circle; The eyes like a horse, empty until filled with fear. We blink at each other; I unmoving, he breaking the many layers of symmetry created here.

Now at my feet, I open my legs for him. He falls onto swollen knees.

We stare at each other, breathing in the stink of abandonment and fear. I don’t know why he is like this, why he is different from the others. I don’t know why he traces my cheek. I just lean in.

@nosebleedclub September Prompt 11. Circling

[pollinateme]

Raleigh Was Right

By William Carlos Williams

We cannot go to the country

for the country will bring us

no peace

What can the small violets tell us

that grow on furry stems in

the long grass among the lance shaped

leaves?

Though you praise us

and call to mind the poets

who sung of our loveliness

it was long ago!

long ago! when country people

would plow and sow

with flowering minds and pockets

at ease—

if ever this were true.

Not now. Love itself a flower

with roots in parched ground.

Empty pockets make empty heads.

Cure it if you can but

do not believe that we can live

today in the country

for the country will bring us

no peace.

[pollinateme]

Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over.

Donna Tartt - The Secret History

[pollinateme]

14-Word Father

I know you as much as anyone can know anyone

through a projection of blue light and sensationalized headlines.

“Service Information is not available.”

What’s left is smaller than it should be, a man boiled down

to a choice—an addiction— to leave flesh unclaimed, untethered.

“Cremation arrangements were entrusted to Blue Mountain Cremation Services.”

@nosebleedclub September Prompt 9. On the News

[pollinateme]

Abandoned Dog

When your fingers trace my spine

I feel your love the most,

like an abandoned dog, tied with twine

skittish but willing to let you close.

@nosebleedclub September Prompt 8. Abandoned Dog

[pollinateme]

I could have coped much more easily with a momentary insanity than with this terrible, invisible thing.

Marlen Haushofer - The Wall

[pollinateme]

In Defense of a Dirty Mattress

My neighbors’ door knew we were white trash,

Accessible via crossed beams and clean, silent, steps.

If you climbed through the sanded edges, you’d find yourself

Not hidden but veiled under slated light and whispered judgments.

We created a wedding registry using lidless markers resoaked

In Coke cans as ashtrays, a mistake you only make once.

My mother trimmed flowers from the neighbors’ back yard,

Did you know you can create jelly from dandelions? It tastes like honey.

First a front porch swing missing one of its chains,

We sat three abreast, our thighs sliding off one another.

Back down the alley - feeling the crunch between my teeth,

The spandrel suddenly capacious and space expands, creating pressure.

I don’t remember being dirty, just sleeping without sheets

Except the viscous mass forming around my feet.

Half under a lilac bush - another of my mother’s jellies

Beside a cosmos of opportunity, glittering stars and ash belts.

I spread my arms wide - just enough space to

Haplessly run back to those girls who understood.

We carry the litter in ceremony, the edges digging into our shoulders

Bearing the weight of their freedom and anticipation and silence.

Did you know three young girls can bend a bed in half?

Sometimes I imagine myself walking down those stairs,

Having a bald head and a pretty wife, arguing with someone under my breath,

Only to see a pile of girls on a yellow-stained mattress beneath my feet.

[pollinateme]

Rats in the Underground

i.

I can feel the crushing vibrations of the train in the knobs of my knuckles.// We wait, tails tucked, between a child’s sandal and a cigarette butt. Safety defined by a small concave, packed dense by millions before me.// Their eyes burn into my twitching back. Our interlocutors to the Gods.// Wires leaking venom, the screeching animal only a breath above me, its own a stench so rancid it fills my eyes.// Do not fall for the false stop.//

ii.

A mother’s mother’s mother assured we'd survive. My own says I have her nose.// The dark a demarcation, freedom.// Deeper into the tunnels, carved by our Gods through the hands of the hairless ones. They believe we siphon their ichor but all they offer is libation in the form of drunken piss.// Every step a step closer to safety, to the aggregate of resistance and family.//

iii.

The reveal is always grand after being away.// We’re deep enough that the vibrations die on Earth’s lips.// Layer upon layer of sediment and architecture and light, forming the homes that form the very structure of our underground paradise. They leak color, scintillating.// Generations of mirth and labor are connected with pathways like telephone wires. Thousands speeding—up, down, left, right— electric with life.// The place isn’t clean. You can see and smell the history but the history is mine.// Under the creatures blind with hubris, there is pride.//

@nosebleedclub September Prompt 6. To Safety

[pollinateme]

Lake House

I once met someone with a lake house with a pool.

“So we can swim in the winter.”

As if the point of a lake house in the winter

isn’t to stare at something that can kill you and

remember how good it was when it couldn’t.

@nosebleedclub September Prompt 5. Lake house

[pollinateme]

His eyes radiate a goodness that I used to think made him a little foolish, now it just seems wildly brave.

Pierce Brown - Morning Star (Red Rising, #3)

[pollinateme]

Cirque du Toit

A roof next door is covered in circus peanuts.

In the dead of night, under a tented moon,

black-masked thieves gather, slow and clumsy.

They giggle and tumble over one another

like gymnasts contorting their bodies,

or contemporary dancers crawling through the street.

Multiple generations stand hand-in-washed-hand,

waiting for the flood lights to interrupt

neither ceremony or devotion but play.

Performing the same rites from before man,

watching this audience on a rooftop in a city

hostile, hard, and loud with applause.

Encircled, a lone juggler tosses stars

—that are really planes but raccooons don’t know planes

between her hands in a quiet satisfaction

knowing she was chosen by her peers.

As quickly as it began, the performers pack

up their trinkets and shells and children

into a caravan balancing on a brick wall

leading to another performance under a sugar maple.

Only one, green with inexperience, left behind

peanuts on an otherwise unsuspecting venue.