Shimmering bright but
She’ll crumble like eye shadow
if you touch her. Don’t.
There they stand, pretty maids all in a row.
Salt of the earth #tradwives, wrapped in aprons
and humility, baking sour dough rolls
and buns in ovens since two became one.
The glory of their lord shines all about,
pillar cocked and smoking, an inferno —
a raging reminder of what’s been vowed:
be fruitful and multiply, trust and oh-
babes, you’ve let the laundry pile up and re-
sentment rush in, gathering here, drifting
there, coating your once-fertile crescents in
barren grains of sand. Your mindsets must shift,
be pliant, dutiful, beautiful, not
lost shakers of salt, defying your lot.
…I mean how much good could should would truly come from plumbing your depths beyond the breadth of your womb your tomb your lead balloon waking shaking breaking (no mistaking it) free willy-nilly I mean really from your perimeter placement on the parched and patterned pages of that aged staged staid and time to be waylaid patriarchy?
by Heather Peters Candela
Like
a calico kitten or a Dalmatian pup?
An appaloosa’s flanks or a speckled green toad?
Ladybug shells or butterfly wings?
A giant giraffe neck, a ginger’s freckled chest?
Cheetahs? Leopards?
A lantern fly nymph?
Or more like
Blueberry muffins
Or chocolate chip scones?
Or more like red-capped, warted
mushrooms? Poison hemlock stems?
Or spotted like
Cruella Deville’s floor-length fur coat?
Daisy Buchanan’s skittering pearls?
Desdemona’s strawberry handkerchief?
The sleep-haunted hands of Lady Macbeth?
Gertrude’s black and grained soul?
Or spotted like
The hiccupping sun’s surface,
Brewing disruption in planet-sized
Storms of magnetic mayhem…
Pretty much like this thing
Spotted
There on the monitor,
Blooming like Rorschach’s inkblot
Amidst the hollowed-out, round, sound-
Waves spinning didgeridoo vowels amidst
Rumbling, bubbling bowel sounds.
A shifting, sizable storm cloud.
A pale and pockmarked moon.
A shadowy, seething portent.
Marring the vault of a once
procreant cradle.
A dappled dollop of disorder.
Spotted.
Get it out, out.
Just yesterday morning, rain clouds filled the sky in gray velvet folds draped heavy over the newly hatched woods, leaves shivering, sagging from the weight, the wait. The dogwood blossoms — bright as match flares – trembled, knowing soon they’d be doused, tender petals downed and drowned. The cardinal couple, wings flame-stitching the shadows as they lit from sod bank to branch and back again, banked on a breakfast cut short and shared their worm like Lady-and-the-Tramp pasta boiled well past its prime. While the cat, shoulders knuckled, crept toward them, one ear cocked to her prize, the other to the threatening cloudburst, the roll of thunder overhead. Then the clouds split wide –not with rain, but golden sun – showering treetops
in cream soda light,
leaves glowing lemon and lime,
blossoms blinding white
Today the same skies are different still, pale pink haze over lavender-blue, lying whisper-soft as an infant’s shawl above the feathered limbs of fizzy trees. The cat naps on her pillow. The dogwood blossoms tremble still, at the brevity of it all, the beauty of it all, as does the cardinal couple singing cheer, cheer, cheer through the
baby soft hiccup
of this morning’s scene, dogwood
blossoms losing steam
Last night, I watched a dozen preteen
boys hunt Easter eggs in the pixelated
gloaming.
Too big for their baskets, they chose bags
for their haul, grocer’s plastic snapping in
the wind
as they raced. Each new prize plucked from
its hiding spot settled snug in their sacks,
until, from
the ends of their peach-fuzzed arms hung
lanterns of multi-globed splendor, synapsed
and pulsing
with LED portent. Soon peach-fuzzed forearms
turn to timber-lined jaws and egg-hunting spring
turns to
university fall. And so on and so on until one day
quite soon, these too-big for-their-baskets egg-
hunters
become fathers with sons who choose the pull of
plastic beneath their fingers to the heft of handles
in their palms.
expose the wonder. peel my layers back
with persistence and your forked, silver tongue
‘til light unzips my folds and I lose track
and all control; ‘til hoofbeats pound, unstrung
notes sound, in the bowl of my core, the bell
of my temple vibrating, keenly and round.
peel me with your teeth, pomegranate knelled
and bursting, unleashing all the profound,
forbidden mysteries of paradise
throb after throb unspooling like ticker tape,
grazed nerves flushed with brimstone and god light,
making my body, consciousness, soul ache
for more dances with death, more cessation
of breath, more kingdom-come-hellfire-salvation.
She walks
in beauty like a
Joan Crawford/geisha
girl, like a paper doll, silken
kimono cinched tight at the
waist, soft sleeves ballooning
beneath shoulder pads, fabric
flaked with the fragments
of your love, with the
fragments
of your
whims and shifting moods.
Blue like the jet stream from
that trip in September to Paris,
the one where she spilled coffee
(your coffee) at that café and it got
on your newspaper, and it got on
your nerves. She wears that
memory, you know,
deep inside.
She wears it
like the azaleas
blooming at those houses
you toured in Savannah last spring,
their pearlized pinkness nearly matching
the sunset and her lips, before the blood and bruising.
Before something, a misstep — a missed step on the historic
steps — broke a heel on the Prada pumps you bought her just
three weeks before, so you broke something too. Some
thing you regret, of course. Something that turned
all those little pink houses ghostly gray, the
pinch of your fist erasing her smile, the
soft light in her eyes. The wind will
rise, she’s learned, and she can
only try to curl inward for
shelter, to erase her
self even more.
Her center
is cinched
tight, but
her fold-
over
tabs
flap loose as,
broken-cheeked, with blackened-brow,
she walks in beauty, diminished by night.
A child was lost.
A child lost.
The world beat him
Battered him, bruised him to breaking,
And – go figure —
He broke.
His spokes gave out.
His wheels flew off.
His handlebars torqued.
And he tumbled.
He’d been tumbling awhile.
But this time,
He tumbled so far
He could not,
Would not –
Refused –
To get back up.
On the front end of a warm Tuesday
At the ass end of a cold month,
Sick to death with hurt,
He took charge.
With a discharge that fixed
And dilated
His pain
In a huge, gaping hole.
That opened to a ravine
That swallowed a family
And shook a school
And rattled a community.
His mother unhinged
His father undone
His siblings unstrung
His promise unsung
His lyrical, beautiful,
Guitar-humming
Soul-strumming
Sweet promise,
That could make this place beautiful
– so, so beautiful –
Left unsung.
How can we fix this?
Not this, that’s impossible —
Fixed forever in a curled dark hole
Deep in his family’s ribs
Howling unchecked —
But this?
This brokenness
This curled dark hole
Deep in society’s rib
Howling unchecked
… and ignored.
How?
You must change your life, Rilke said.
There is no place that does not see you.
So, burst like a star from all the borders
of yourself.
And to do that, you must:
Pause
and attend to
the riotous performances
of those that
recognize life
and its beauty in the
here and now,
in the being,
said Oliver.
And to do that, you must:
Be alive in the fresh morning.
Be the dark center where procreation flares.
So, pivot like Rilke. Pause like Oliver.
Be permissive.
Like a poet.
Like roses,
fully blown,
drinking the air of the silver morning
with their petal-soft mouths,
tasting and celebrating all that there is,
in moment after moment of perfumed possibility.
Pay attention.
Do that.
postmodernfamilyblog 