Tag: poetry
-
from Parchment, Scalpel, Rock: Howling
a wolf is a tunnel into the earth …… full of teeth (and what should I call a sideways stalag mmm-/t-ite?) not just the wind howling through the steppes’ hollow torso? a zero-sum game? an eremophage without organs? the little bumps ‘become’ horns……the horns become penises the penises teeth …… the teeth : skeletons…
-
The Time of the White Wolf
It snowed for thirty years and no-one knew when the snow would end. The old people could remember the times before the snow, But none of the young ones had ever seen the sun rise or set or blaze at midday. None of them had traced the patterns made by the stars in the night…
-
Shortening the Candle’s Wick I
Realisation I lie in the rich grass a blissful ringing in my head. Distant voices bring me food the way ants brought gold to a king in olden times. There are two horseflies. There may even be a snake around here somewhere. In any case there is an old mill-pond and downstream are some…
-
Shortening the Candle’s Wick II
Over the wet alders the wind gallops along the road raging, swinging a club. Then tired out in the high pines’ lap like a child after crying still sobs. Wet, the colour of tree trunks, lifting up her skirt’s hem, the old woman quietly goes. Gathered from roadside bilberry shrubs in her billy can the…
-
Coyote
All aboard, climb inside! Back of the van! Get back, Loretta! Only 1500 miles to the promised land! Farm jobs, construction, cleaning, meatpacking, don’t bleed when you’re cut or you go right back! Need papers? Housing? A lawyer? A clue? My cousin, he’ll hook you up. Fenrir. We grew up together. Wolf, coyote, closer than…
-
The girl and the half wolf sound
Release the pack into their whorling wolfscream. A lightning-cut electrified cable of a scream, sparking to a panicked dance. Let its coiled metal whips snap out and back in thwarted reach. I am just a jogger in a forest with racing huskies hoarse behind me. I lived to tell this tale and all the…
-
Little Death Waltz
In the heart of hearths there is her, she wolf . . . . . . . .who, linking arms with your first-born, . . . . . . . .who, shedding dresses, crossing breeds with . . . . . . . .leading him on to . . . . . . ….
-
Borders
On the Eve we eat menudo. Onion mimics moon from a small bowl, glinted fractals of itself. Cilantro’s diced flesh lingers in the air. Bolilllos wait, steam rising. We all wait. I have inherited this––my life on this schism of wild land, purple montañas littered by desert primrose, a muddy river and barbed wire…
-
Rooting
. . . . . . . . . .Chihuahua Desert Blood slid to soil and our roots splintered wide like needle-edged leaves of agave. We can never escape this desert root, dry to core and apt for bitter survival, snide thirst. A cacti can be barren then, overnight, sprout flame petals, but…
-
How to Make a Map for Ethnic Cleansing
. . . . . . . . . .an elegy Demark colored lines fluid as the Red sea and place names for distance.. . . . . . . . . .Cherokee–– We are a region where herds wait, swallowing grass like fire. . . . . . . . . .Seminole––…
-
Apples & Other Languages
Camilla Nelson’s words bring things to life. ‘Stir this miracle to waking,’ she says, in the first poem in Apples & Other Languages, a signal of the alchemy of ideas to follow. Here, the intangible and the inanimate take on new form: windpipes ‘sound themselves furiously’, a song ‘breaks the ice we stand on’. But…