Full Moon Visage

You can’t see her face.
     No not really.
She will look right at you
     and not through.
Her gaze’s wide and white as the moon,
     with pulps black as space.
You are not permitted to see the entirety of her.
     No, not ever.

But then you can’t see the back of her head.
And how she does her hair.
Is it a tight bun rolled like perfect dinner rolls?
Or is it woven in a French braid,
the stands held together by precise handicraft and spells.
When she lets it hang lose
the curls and threads circumnavigating her face.
What is she telling you?
her mouth forever closed.

Let us conjecture,
the she is merely reflecting your light.
Her iris a rainbow of your psych.
A multi-mythology in a single face.

Look at her.
Wide and white.
Open and black.
Do you hair as she does
     (to the best of your ability)
And hope that one day when you see your face
in the reflecting pool of the future
You see her
your sister, your mother, your friend
all at the same time.

The Queens Final Breath

The Queen was escorted to the brood hives to lay her final egg. Into this prefect and golden hexagon she poured all her royal jelly. For the next six days, she sat besides the future queen and retold the whole of her life. She pushed the story of herself and her reign though the royal jelly spiked with scents like delphinium and lavender, clover and buckwheat, apple and rose petals. It was pungent with salt and mead. It was thick and hot like the ant-oil. It was bright like an epiphany.

She poured the entirety of herself into the cell in hopes that her dreams and her drive would penetrate the soft white body of her truest of children. It was as close as she could get to living forever. Bees like bacterium, whales, humans, and snakes want to live forever and so they do whatever they can to become like the gods and goddesses of old, immortal. They tell stories to their young about themselves and their history in hopes that when their body has released the soul that they might continue to work here on earth. Some do it out of fear. Some do it out of a biological urge. Others do it because they want to see their reflection in their child’s bright and immaculate face. Bee’s fall somewhere in between this triangle of self preservation. Death to a Queen is her final act and she will never again get to the chance to send a chemical message or dance a command in which to enact her will and there for fears insufficient amounts of nectar will be collected. She feels a compulsion to work, being a creature of engineering and industry and hopes her queendom will not fall into rune when her body becomes nothing more than a chitin shell  on the forest floor. In the shining pool of jelly she sees her mirroring eyes and her child all at the same time. And with a final breath like prayer to the new queen, she exhales and the humming of her engine heart halts like the grinding of rusted gears.

Animalistic Attributes

The kingdom of animalia contains a great multitude of creatures, all whom reflect the virtues and evils of the human experience. Take the lion for example. See how his pelt reflects the prefect golden rays of the sun. Her roar is like that of dictator’s demands and it will not be denied. Therefore lions have the adoration of nobility and those who take pride in simplicity of being alive. Or take the swallow family (Hirundinidae) who are all attributed the principles of physics. The common barn swallow reflects velocity and the Black Saw-Wing for speed. The Wire-Tailed Swallow with its tail like two needles holds bilateral direction in its iconography; the Sand Martin is the embodiment of acceleration. The only exception to this universal rule is the Purple Martin, who did not care much for the science. On the day the Purple Martin was created, she chose to be the patron saint to those who live in tenements, a omen to landlords and dukes, and a symbol for vanity for children and first year students in any discipline. 

But what of the insects who scudded across the sea floor and methodically climb up trees or burro into the soil? Do all moths and wasps and ladybugs bless the professions of pilots or aeronauts? Of course bugs and all thing things that creep towards your bare feet in long summer days are no different from the lions or swallows or three-toed sloths  who obviously rules over the lazy but also patronage the world of fungi, chefs, and farmers in winter to a lesser degree. 

So why should you believe me that the creatures of the air, the earth, and the sea are connected to deeds and behaviors of us highly evolved and complex beings. Plainly said, you shouldn’t. But know this; Should you look at a monarch butterfly and see nothing more than orange and black pulsing against the blue sky, then I shall tip my straw hat in your general direction and wish you a good lunch and a productive afternoon. But realize that you have been blessed by this insect with its powers of endurance, its Capricornian nature, and that report due at 3:00PM will get done forty-four minutes sooner than if you had not caught mosaic wings out of the corner of your hazel eyes. You see but this is one example of how our friends with six legs and segmented bodies help us even though they will infiltrate our sugar jars and make nest below the eves at times.

PUBLISHED

YES! IT HAS FINALLY HAPPENED. I’m pretty sure my fourteen-year-old self is in tears. I haven’t been submitting hard core like so many other others but in a relatively short amount of time, I have achieved the status of PUBLISHED AUTHOR! It feels absolutely fantastic. There has been a shameless promotion in one of my classes which of course was embarrassing (Cheers to you, Carly). Literally started crying last night and had to rained it in (there was a little celebration with red wine of course).

Of Agrarian Advice is published in With Painted Words which is an online literary magazine. The premise is actually pretty frickin awesome. “Simply put this is a creative writing site that puts the adage, "a picture paints a thousand words" to the test. The premise is that, each month, an image will be given as a visual prompt and you will have up to one thousand words to tell the story that you are inspired to write ... using your imagination as the canvas and language as your brush.” They publish micro fiction (250-500 words), flash fiction (500 to 1,000 words) and poetry.

I feel so privileged and so much thanks go out to all those at With Painted Words. I hope the magazine increases in popularity and you continue to take chances on unpublished authors.

*The picture is from the October issue of With Painted Words and is the inspiration for all stories (and a poem) in the magazine. The artist is Chris Howard.

The Metaphysics of Breakfast: Coffee and Milk

Coffee belongs to earth,

It is first a tree,

then a nut,

then roasted,
over the bodies of more trees.

Finally, it is ground,

into dirt.

And smells like earth, and leather, and musk.

Milk belongs to the sky.

It comes from a beast,

painted with images of impressionist clouds.

It is pulled down and down and down,

hitting pails of metal,

like rain on a roof.

It has no scent,

unless sour.

It is white like the sky and cream

shifts through it like sylphs.

When coffee meets milk.

Poured so slowly,

it is a great conception.

White meeting black

Bold finding sweetness

Swirling together in cups,

which are memories embodied.

And together they soften, and

make bearable the passage,

of earth meeting sky.

Reality Check

I need a reality check,

    a list of what is real,
    and where it is placed.
A diagnostic for life,
    these moments
    their coordinates in space/time

the air temperature and pressure,
the phase of the moon
the dimensions of a 5 bedroom town home.
the velocity of muscles reaching for jam.
the decibel level of a bus at 7:44 am
the parameters for programming alarm clock

What is the length of space between here
    and where I am going?
How long will it take to get there when caring
    1K + 85K + dreams?
Will I have enough liters of fuel to get there,
    if I don’t calculate in every variable?

What do we do with ‘matter out of place’
Do we right it and call it good.
Give it the blessing and go to sleep
Is it forever out of place,
calculable but always in a different place
moved for the moment and knowing
energy can never be created or destroyed

only transferred (perpetual motion)
And hair brushed once will have to brushed again
and muscles stretched, toned, torn,
will have to be worked again, and again, and again
until the heat death of this body in
two thousand seventy something.

[November 2011]

The Day Patriarchy Won for a Moment

I think she grew tired of her scales.
One day in space
they tipped to one side,
and we lost our way.

Of course a day in heaven
is a millennium for Us
(space/time is like that)
The moment they tipped
in one direction
was about a 6000 year process.

I think she is just picking up
her scales again.
Chains singing vibrations,
a string of holy harmonics
throughout time and space.

It was such a calamity;
that cosmic consternation.
Sagittarius shot her a glare,
and Leo let out a great roar.
Aries, Taurus, and Capricorn
fell to their knees.

We all were touched
by the shifting of a starry muscle.

Oh the heavens shook that day,
when Virgo faltered,
and Libra tumbled out of balance.
How that shaped our world,
they will never know.

The Verb: to Write

What is a myth

but a creation story told at slant;
a skewed eye speaking through its iris;
all the spectral colors of a rainbow
dancing through a space/time matrix
colliding with a web of well formed
malleable, plastic, electric rope mass
we call a brain.

What is a story
but a tale told over fire;
a groove carved into the earth;
an archetype with a thousand faces;
a goat track that everyone can follow
but is fully traveled by those who really know
the words by head and heart and hoof.

What are words
but A,E,I,O,U,
(and some days Y)
strung together with consonants
fastened with punctuation
meant to pierce the skin
and vibrate the flesh.

What is a plot
but catabasis or anabasis;
a series of descents, accents,
and single points
on paper and on air and on the lips of time,
written on the horizon of space;
an old woman with her old dog
wrapped in an old blanket speaking
I feel that’s all I have to say
               for now.

[2011]

Breakfast With Inanna

for those I miss

I sat with Inanna one morning,
and she bled red and black on to the table cloth.
I told her not to worry about it,
                ruined now from her trails.
And she said with a nail-gouged tongue
                clear as the sky
“What is there to worry about?”

Shamed, naked, I poured her more coffee.
“I called you to ask a question…
how do you live with your sister so far away?”

Her eyes burned bight as the sun
and she set her mug down,
                leaving a ring of brown.
Removed her crown and lapis earrings
                she cracked her knuckles
And with the surest and simplest of motions
She ripped out my heart.

She set it upon the table,
                more red, more brown, more black
and it still beats there
                this is a power of all Goddesses
                              to continue the human heart
Pumping away as if it has been there forever

I gasped. I flailed. I spilt coffee and blood.

I hurt and it was unbearable.
It was all hot tears and violent jack-knifing of limbs
I could see only Inanna,
I could see only Ereškigal.
I could feel only that space where she use to be.

“There.
That is how you live with your sister not next to you.
You breathe with shallow breaths.
Your limps will grasp at empty air to find her.
Your ears will only hear the blood
                that use to be where she was.
That is how you will live.”

I fell backward
                on to the floor, the earth.
Attempts were made to grasp at life
                my fingers holding only dirt

“And you will only be still until she puts your there 

Right under your fingernails; her dirt
Right through that space she made in your heart;
her hook; her nail; her spike.”

And finally I stopped
                it all stopped.
“Silence is your sister; is my sister.
She is a far away as we chose.”

[2011]

STEVE

Steve has arrived… of sorts. 

I feel the most confident I have been about this story in a while. Yes, I sent it into Palooka: The journal of Underdog Excellence but while re-reading Steve a week ago (and catching several spelling errors and grammatical infractions) I decided to go through it once again. So yes, it’s a few hundred words longer, and feels more polished. Of course I could work on it some more but what artist doesn’t feel that way about their creations. 

So in this light I really want to resubmit my work to Palooka but seeing how the dead line is about 3 days away… I don’t know. I think I’ll just take my chances. 

That being said, I’ve run a small amount of hard copies (cover page and everything) of Steve. I want to sell them for $5.00 each cause the print shop isn’t free. I know five bucks can seem like a lot for 30 some pages of fiction writing but here’s my reasoning for charging.

A)     A) I’m hella broke. No the profit on the books won’t account for much other than covering the cost of printing.

B)      B) I need to get my name out there and I want to be taken seriously. In our economy, if a monetary value is attributed it is worth something. So there is that fun piece.

C)      That’s basically it.

Shoot me an e-mail or text or call me it you want a copy. I would love to share my work with you and in turn help spread your creative works as well.