[x]

Going, going, goneGoing, going, gone

Three dollars, three fifty, four, the bristles
of Daddy's hairbrush, a handful of porcupine quills
rough as his unshaven face. In the trees,
moths roost like hens, their wings so still
as though Daddy had painted them.
The auctioneer, his black felt hat drooping
with the heat, strides across the snow of their wings,
Daddy's wristwatch nesting
in the palm of his hand, a raven. "Nevermore,"
Daddy would read to us. "Never again,"
Mama said bundling up Daddy's things with prickly twine.
He painted everything: house, barn, yearlings, tractor. "Sold,"
yells the auctioneer, a weathercock in his arms,
wings rough as

Rorschach's BlotRorschach's Blot

Spiders and bears and misshapen trees,
when the swollen fruit drops it bursts into wren wings,
salamander tails shivering, the color of bruised plums.
It tastes so sweet, the tip of a beak.
With a straight pin, I peck at my arms,
a Pollock of blood, swarms of carnelian bees.
Sweet sweet stings. The poison sings.
They say hallucinations, the saints said visions.
"Ollie ollie oxen free," they call running through orchards,
the evening air loosening, a grace note of despair.
There was once an apple and it was bitten,
poor thing, all hell broke loose.
"Tell me what you see," he asks.
"White," I say, hospital sheet

DullDull

Your voice falters,
your hands chopping
cauliflower, parsley, grace.
Saint Theresa felt the love of God as an arrow.
You don't know what to say.
Adomni Christos, her stigmata is an open mouth,
articulate with blood.
"We could try ...." you start to say,
the knife slips, a pale bloodless cut.
"Let me see," I ask, even though
there is nothing I can do.
This thing that has caught us
is dull not sharp.

The Day After the FuneralHer Husky arises every few minutes,
in order to expose different parts of its mottled coat
to the flickering fire,
the dog turns in a lazy stop-start orbit
of fur and slurry-jawed yawns.

Beside the same dying flames,
a leather-bound Bible rests
on my Grandmothers lap,

an hour or so ago
the old rocking chair creak
fell silent,

now her head of silver hair
slouches to a side,
bifocals searching for escape
from the tip of her wrinkled nose,
the slow purr of her outward breath
makes a comforting sign
of late-evening life.

I should really venture out
to the dark dewy fields,
out to the open night stars,
to gather mo

StiraboutThe ghosts of a thousand Celts
haunt where you lie, heavy as time,
dream-quiet in ochre and grey.
Warm as an October moon,
soft in a pink-cheeked dawn,
you wake to honey and cream
under my hand, butter melting
into a strawberry kiss,
just so.

The Growing Seasoni.
we slipped between each other's flesh,
intoxicated on the nectar—
never careful enough
to avoid the bitter seeds
of a previous commitment.

ii.
each night the pregnant ache coaxes
wicked acts to replay
along my nerve endings and synapses;
each night, the gardener's
tending hands
rooting deep.

iii.
were I to untether myself,
to prune the growing stillborn
from my chest,
you'd have no secrets
conceived of sin;
no reason to carry my face,
my voice, my touch,
in a painful miscarriage
of our unprotected actions—

were I
less than a weed.

iv.
each morning my stomach rejects
the early hour
into my utilitarian b

SacramentSacrament

Her belly hangs full and heavy, a sack of potatoes.
The painter's wife grabs at a pew to steady herself when she stands.
The priest glares, his vestments white, the words:
"Fornication, serpent's tooth and Whore of Babylon"
lie like uncoiled strings inside his mouth. He knows,
she will drag them down to sin, her mouth a peddler's pack
filled with combs, bodkins and prickly heresy.
"Eat and you shall become as gods." But Ann only smiles.
The knife unfolds like a bird's wing. When she cuts her palms,
the Xs are red cross stitches.
"Drink and it will become wine," she says and it does.
The angels napping in the church eaves

Hamburg, GermanyHamburg

Seven years ago, on a street in Hamburg Germany,
angels told you things, their eyes unblinking
as a lizard's flat stare. You were fixed on the apocalypse, bits of sky falling.
You didn't tell anyone, no need to warn.
Instead you stood and watched as tulips of beaten sun filled your outstretched hands
until they towed you away and strapped you tight, sleeves tied in back.
Eventually the crystal in your blood dried
and flaked like old paint. "I was really crazy then"
you told me once, your hands quick as a lizard's tongue
as you stroked the inside of my thigh.
But now as we sit in this cafe,
angels once again buzz around

Does It Bother Your Mind The Way You Bother MineIt could be defined as this unintelligible sympathy, refined
and infinitely describable.  Words are a feeble comparison.
My speech is slop, fecal matter.  Repulsive residues spew from ineffective
communication.  And you're speaking, but what the fuck are you saying?
                   To be wrong.

It may run deeper than that, an invasive core crowding the marrow of your bones.
Humiliation in strength, pungent structure uniting beneath sinuous muscle and
skin.  Imperative awareness skittered across pa

Painter's WifeThe Painter's Wife

Whenever she sees the virgin's face,
her mind smoothes itself into a blank.
Her husband thinks it's grief. Rather it is grave recognition.
She hears the hiss
and scratch of angel wings. When she sleeps,
the angels curl up against her like fevered damp children.
They never console her for the dead child
that floats in her belly. Whenever she forces it
out into rough being, it swims back
into her huddled emptiness again and again.
Her husband has painted a multitude of virgins
as though by painting a woman with a living child,
he can give her a living child.
But she knows better. The virgin bore a child
for tho

PluckingPlucking

The table between us is a moon.
But the air is heavy. It lies
on us, muffled heat stilling
our breaths. You drop your fork,
but I still won't look at you. Even angels
would crawl if they were here.

"Why can't we be friends?"

I am thinking of a Flemish tapestry
I once saw in a white stone house,
walls dense and prickly with roses:
a line of stiff scarlet soldiers,
a rearing horse. The soldiers' thick fingers
grope at the blank cream cloth,
seeking purchase, gravity.

"What are you feeling?"

"I want to be a Flemish soldier,"
I tell you. Only my fingers
would constantly pluck at the expanse,
searching for the thread
that will unra

Bad Mouth Habitsi.
I carry God around in my lip like he's chew,
spitting his name out in poems like potholes,
I make everything a simile
for the hold he has on me.

ii.
When it comes to men,
I've the appetite of a Roman housewife,
I take, I taste, I tear,
swallow and then then toss up
for the next course.

iii.
I don't kiss anyone so dearly
as the glass pipe bridged between lips
and fist.

iv.
Jameson, you're an Irish Lad,
a young ram of bucking proportions,
I let you rattle around my mouth
til I herd you in
and down.

v.
Sometimes there's nothing so sweet
as the jack-hammer of angry words
or the steel trap clamp of silence.

I exercise m

The Last Lie of SummerQuiet days, the overcast sky keeps
to itself, ignoring the living for weeks
at a time.

From half a state away-

you could hear trains roll through
towns like mine.

There is peace
and it can't be trusted

Undeserved suspicion
given to the first
fallen leaves.

This was the calm before the calm.
The man that is seen, but
nobody knows.

Promise yourself:
"Tomorrow I will say hello to him."

But we are all too busy dressing healed wounds.

Achromatic Dreamstoday, god gave me present.

-
i.

stilted windows, white bones
decaying lungs and my mind races
at the rate of a lone moth's jaded wings

we taste better alone

ii.

clemency is earned
by the damned, by the damned
arbitrary sacrifices

we belong to nobody

iii.

and she bowed with artless grace
kissed the sky, shed stardust tears
choked on angelic moonshine

we draw our own constellations
-

today, i gave god presence.

MoonMoon

You left the knife on the drainboard,
bits of lettuce scattered like green rice.
We should get married, you tell me,
this house tight as a ring around us.
In every room, sleep waits for me.
Sometimes I wake sprawled on the wooden floor
not remembering that I fell.
Things blur, the copper pans
hanging on the wall swell in tight glowing bellies
woven rugs flow like rivers.
At night, your face flowers into an open moon,
filling our bed with light
There is no place left to hide.

Browse More Like This

Download File
HTML, 1.2 KB more ▶

More from *swansisters

WhoseWhose

The angels want her to die not him.
They pierce his skin
and blanket him with feathers,
a coat of eider, plume, penna, cilium and blood.
They want him to fly with them. He is one of them.
Their veins thread him, hard bright wires.
When she pants and bleeds in labor, they lap at her blood.
It burns, a metallic drunkenness.
The angels whirl as Mary moans and grunts.
He grows and Mary laughs. She dabbles honey
on his tongue and teaches him string games,
a maze of thread where there is no end,
no birth. Even when he bleeds,
the angels know the blood is hers not his.

BeliefBelief

She tells him the child is not his.
The old women mutter and cluck
as they slap wet cloth against river stones.
He wraps his arms around his chest as though he fears
he will also sprout with child. "A dove,"
he quietly asks? She points to a blood spot
on her cheek. "He pecked me here." It still hurts
when she touches it. It always hurts.
He loves the child, the cuckold's hatchling. He loves his lying wife.
But he knows she lies. When the old men stumble
into the stable, beards matted, coarse as grain,
he simply mutters, "Drunks," bad wine, betrayal.
One afternoon as he saws cedar planks, sawdust thick as pollen,
an angel catches his

Snake TattooSnake Tattoo

A dense black line coils around his arm,
a rope around my waist.
It pulls, a hot deep tugging.
A vet, he buys me one drink after another,
vodka distinct as a bite.
“I killed,” he tells me, “they died.”
In the parking lot, four horseman gather,
the hooves of their horses black sink holes,
dark as the inside of a broken doll’s head.
The cop hits again and again a man curled into a ball.
“One of the men who raped me
told me he was a cop.” I stiffen, startled by my voice.
The vet reaches to touch me,
“Don’t.” He flinches, his hand pulling back,
a trigger, a man’s b

RemembranceRemembrance

I will not remember,
an ice spurred window is more forgiving.
Your words a drought,
leaving me heat broken.
I want ice.
Reverberations of your presence wither.
I am still trying to find the nerves you dismembered.
A beggar swaps the core of my heart
for an old wool coat, moth splattered holes.
I will not remember.
I will section existence,
stop my eyes from reproducing hollows.
I will not remember.
My flesh always suspicious,
my eyes pigeon-toed with vacancy.
I will number eternity with the swoop of a sigh,
plow eggs until they spout dragon teeth.
But your fingertips will always identify my flesh.

AfterthoughtAfterthought

The blood will come. When the first knife cuts,
a red thread to be spun into a hood of garnet grasshoppers.
He has had so many, young throats, tender fingers.
At first they cried for mother and father, maybe God.
Who knows whom their father was.
There was always the blood, that was the grace,
a family of stick figures, a father, a mother
and nine little girls salvaged from prairie grit,
tumbleweeds rolling like chrysanthemums.
The mother was the first, a prized bauble, a trinket.
Just to keep things proper.
They did things right,
the blood was an afterthought.
That's all.

PostcardsPostcards

In the parking lot, my brother shoots plastic arrows
at our station wagon, sleeping bags piled in the back.
"Can we have a pool shaped like a bass guitar,"
he asks, "when we get to California?" I float gum wrapper boats
in the shimmering heat mirage, my knees barnacled
with scabs and mosquito bites. As we drive, we count road kills,
eighteen wheelers and truck stops named after some guy.
You can drink it," Mom says cutting open a barrel cactus.
"Even if you get lost, you'll never die."
She taped Dad's latest postcard to the dashboard.
"Found work. I love you all. Come." We have postcards
from almost every state: amarillos from Lou

View Gallery · View Prints

Featured in Groups:

#Dark-Emotions
DarkART

#BeautifullyDamned
Welcome To The Real Horror Show

#Beautifully-Bloody

#Writing-Obsession

#BleedingArtists
show us your scars

#Word-Smiths

#Dark-And-Beautiful
All Things Dark And Beautiful!

#Insanity-Box

Show all (12)

Details

Submitted: November 2, 2012
File Size: 1.2 KB

Link

Thumb

Statistics

Comments: 5
Favourites: 16 [who?]
Views: 167 (0 today)
Downloads: 2 (0 today)

[x]

Why

by *swansisters, Nov 2, 2012, 8:54:24 PM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

How do I verify your presence
By the unease which canonizes the air
By the irreligious sunspots in labor
A startling ate a cat so I knew you were here
I hid among sterofoamed images
So you could not read my pale spare sweat
I scattered bees among the grapevines
So you cannot hear the pressure of my steps
The moon will still flake its anger
No light will debase our faces
Fireworks, the color of death
I love you
I would not listen to the warnings of goat herders
I love you because we both bleed
I hide the winds among the weaving of a sun dial
You cannot smell my callous sweat
I scattered bees among the grapevines
So you cannot hear me stumble
I flaked away the moon so no light will debase our faces
We will have fireworks the color of death
Stars which faced like yesterday laundry
I love you even though we both bleed
I will have words while you have sentences
By the stubbornness of a flaking moon
I was stubborn, I would not listen
To the warnings of morning

Whyby *swansisters

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

a love poem and the warnings of mornings

The Artist has requested Critique on this Artwork

Please sign up or login to post a critique.

*beeinthebottle Nov 25, 2012 Writer

I love the language and how you use repetition in this. Really, really nice. One little thing; you have "a startling ate a cat" -- did you mean "starling"?

*DerelictVampire Nov 8, 2012

I like the rhythm and the surreal images thrown at us intertwined with stark reality. Your work always makes me feel like there's just an ocean of stuff underneath and you're kind of a valve slowly letting it be revealed.

*swansisters Nov 9, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Thank you that is how is often I feel when I write.

`thetaoofchaos Nov 3, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Love as measured in the prismatic torture of light, mutation of matter from the heightened aging of insolvent feeling.

*swansisters Nov 3, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

<3 thank you!

More from *swansisters

Featured in Groups:

Details

Statistics

Why

Whyby *swansisters

The Artist has requested Critique on this Artwork

The Journal Portal

Polls

What is your preferred drawing software?

deviantART [dee·vee·un'nt·ART]

Keep in Touch!

Deviousness

Add Media

Style