#meeah williams

[uutpoetry]

The Reunion

meeah williams

I found myself falling down a flight of stairs. I could hardly believe it. As I fell, I was literally thinking to myself, I’m falling down the stairs, as if I needed to convince myself. It was such a dreamy, out-of-body, unreal experience. When I reached the bottom, I was surprised to find a lot of people there I already knew. They were tangled together like a pile of discarded mannequins. They made no attempt to get up, but didn’t appear to be hurt or in any pain. Among the crowd, I spotted an aunt who’d died of cancer when I was eight, some kids I knew in high school, a couple of old lovers, lots of ex-workmates. I hadn’t thought of any of them in ages. So this is where they all end up! Surprisingly, everyone was pretty friendly, even the old lovers, a couple of whom had every reason to still hate my living guts.  Upstairs the party was in full-swing but I’d no desire to rejoin it. The effort to untangle myself from the others and climb back up the stairs just didn’t seem worth it. There was nothing up there for me. I was perfectly comfortable where I was, lying in the companionable wreckage at the foot of the stairs.

[uutpoetry]

The 40lb Head

meeah williams

A head came rolling out of an alleyway, bouncing across the sidewalk in front of me. It wasn't really a head but I leapt out of the way before I realized it wasn't and I was clipped by a bakery truck. My hip was shattered. No, it was a mirror that shattered. Learning to walk all over again is frustrating. Sometimes you never want to see your face again for as long as you live. There are many different reasons for wanting to walk on the moon. I don't remember what it was that really came rolling out of that alley. I read in the police report that it was a bakery truck that clipped me or I probably wouldn't have remembered that either. There are good reasons for not remembering the things you don't remember as evidenced by many of the things you do remember. Look, it may have been a head, whose to say? Whether it was a head or not doesn't really matter. It's not the point I’m trying to make.  It was never my goal to walk on the moon. But either way, whose head it was or wasn't is something I never found out.

art by 水蛇.

[uutpoetry]

Engine Cradle Donut Hole

Meeah Williams

Russian tanks came rolling out of the donut hole just as they were arriving at the Professor’s cottage. Gilligan, the most recognizable entity within miles, was perplexed by something simple. Let’s call it polyphony. The first principles of dust manipulation. They were left to chance like a monkey in our collective pocket. The color orange we can’t wash out.

We couldn’t get old Frida Kahlo off the floor for walnuts. She was content to lie there blowing bubbles at the rainforest ceiling. No one could remember if she hung herself or stuck her head in the oven or what & if so what we ever did about it.

Remember, the life you save may come back to haunt you.

Meanwhile, in another room, boarded up for winter, their seed propagated a serpent elite who left for California. Someone downstairs was shouting “There are no George Washingtons!” Just before the gunshots we wanted Woolite. “Here are 98 cents of him!” someone shouted back. BAM BAM BAM! He, too, put on his hat & left, taking his soaking wet boxes with him. “Him and his piranhas,” said his weeping wife, who’d thrown him out. Serves her right. Him, as well. Ah so….

We’ve learned to live with the leopard under the bed. The head stuffed with dust-bunnies, the birdhouse with the broken leg. These are the days Jesus remembered, Jesus, who these days is Himself just a metaphor for King Kong & a spicy brand of cheese spread in an aerosol can who don’t redeem us nothin’. He is crouched on the floor, holding a silver platter lengthwise overhead that, combined with its twin above it, stands in for all our stupid tears.

art by k mackowick

[uutpoetry]

The Old Spag Factory

Meeah Williams

The last time someone wrote a love poem without a smirk or an apology it was 1987.

I remember it well. I had vasoline on my lips. I was a Chevrolet in reverse. I was Chinese checkers.

Because petroleum president & the halibut hum the apricot turned over the sock & such there were 1001 unique moments when the butter was in charge.

Questions, questions the toilet brush the mozambique it’s time to stay horny for the sun clamp your perfume to the stony chimp—

I blasted off from tulip bulbs room deodorant siren I’m with you my hairy monster a great reunion of Indiana Pacers eliminates the air

Here’s your gumbo, sir off you ride your table horns to the secondary moon & three day’s beard & filomena egg stump & egg & egg oh Dad the lumbar region!

art by yumikrum

[uutpoetry]

When you're an angel your arms turn into wings because you won't need to eat soup ever again.

Meeah Williams

[uutpoetry]

Explanation of the Mayan Pyramids

meeah williams

Love is a big animal, you forget until you see it throwing a full-grown man around a concrete enclosure like a chew-toy. Of course, man is a chew-toy. It's amazing the things you can miss. A legendary case of dandruff, for instance. The sirens at 3 am going somewhere else. Some part of me will always be waiting with held breath for the slamming door, the shattered china. Some part of me will always be locked away like silverware for special occasions that never arrive, the feast where I consume the heart of my enemy, my own. I wear an anklet of tiny skulls. I shake my feathered bone. I am an exorcism that didn't go so well. I'm a long series of calculations that ends in null. I've a gaping hole in my hull. Because I didn't go down when I was supposed to go down, people have had to redefine the notion of shipwreck. I'm most proud of that. I have the kinds of scars that only cats can see. They lick them. The tiger, you estimate, about as big as the love-seat we don't sit on. Silence as we contemplate that pseudo-fact. In any book of family photos not one of them is me. I have been excised from everywhere I used to be. The glacial drift of cataracts across her field of vision, a disturbance on the surface of the film where my mother's arthritic finger hesitates over some indistinct blur. Right there, that's me.

art by JohnMoProductions

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Four Uut Tanka

meeah williams

There is hardly room in the jar for you so I take you out in the rain & clip you to the clothesline beside my old clownface

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There was a dead body in the motel pool that turned out to be a radio antennae broadcasting the Civil War

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Between stooped shoulders I carry a giant eyeball right off a cliff— it opens wider & wider all the way down

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Ground zero winked— I was late for the debriefing; meanwhile, my diary married & had 3 kids without me

art by mariana abasolo

[uutpoetry]

The Whitewashed Grandmothers

meeah williams

“…their intention is ambiguous, their progress spiral.” —Leonora Carrington

The Diary of Alice James is a portal to the deepest, yellowest regret. Inside her, an antique sewing machine brutally stitches up the wounds torn open by Magritte’s rooster in Variations of Sadness who can’t tell which of two eggs is a fraud.

Have we hatched yet? Will we ever? Do we dare? A stained jockstrap lies bereft among the loins stripped bare in the meat case. Fluorescent light bathes her hands detached by an interstellar radiance. Without knowing it, she’s been awaiting the authorization to exist. Ha!

Everyone’s a critic. Every egg a threat. The surveillance camera will record the last time we ever see her. She’s waltzing across the polished floor passed the checkout. Her pockets teeming with deep-sea life.

Prompt: O’Hara 1

art by 水蛇.