grandmother hubbard was a merry old soul picked at her teeth with a telephone pole had a gray cat and the cat spoke greek caught its breakfast from a gelatin creek. grandmother hubbard had twenty-three kids sold each off for the highest bids wore soft boots made of lamb and tar rolled old spoons and called it a car. grandmother hubbard never baked or boiled had a parrot in a cage that she kept well-oiled had no cupboard and had no dog slept at night in a mushroom log. _______ for dverse "grandmothers"
7
the christmas queen
Posted: 01/24/2023 in house of blues, house of memory, house of weather, house of womenif it's for-company manners she's all over it uses the good bone china to pass you her shit keeps her kids in her handbag behind her compact see how the poor broken bastards prettily refract smiles snowing, so nice. she cries, and it's ice. ______ a quadrille for dverse, key word "ice."
he wore a lead smock while kissing her. his passion revved her rentgens. you're like rolling the rides at pripyat. it's a cascade of chain reactions. let's spend our half-lives together, dear. we'll contaminate several nations. _______ for denise's six sentence stories
roofers across the street beating sense into that house's head. it's a steep pitch-- they dig in like batters swinging and connecting-- changing what the sky sees.
my friend uses a walker, drops things, is getting worse. i watch my hands, typing this-- ever faithful, as "me" as my next thought, obedient and loyal as a hound. what if (as i think of my friend) i were standing in a field miles from anywhere and the dog turned around with a strange face sending shivers down my spine? what if my mouth went dry, my next command dying in my throat? what then?
Words make fine playthings though some have sharp edges words aren't something to just leave lying around it's possible to fall in love with the pleasing fragrance of them still, baby can get cut bad bleed beneath the mobile that's always in and out of her head but I was left alone with words and was lonely, so now it's too late they're mine.
Her hair was made of Parisian birds, black ones fresh from the girders of the Eiffel, born in the fruit trees below. Being beside her made me feel slow like a rock in a river, glistening and constant in the rushing water. I loved coffee, she loved her awful tea brewed in basements by admirers from rainwater and autumn leaves. God was in her pied a terre and in the spires of cathedrals across from her balcony, themselves stones of a sort perpetual in stillness beneath infinity. I miss, sometimes, the Parisian birds and hallucinate them on odd evenings when the hyacinth air teases with the memories and feelings one gets while walking by the canal. I glitter, these nights, and in the end constancy won out, while beauty became faded, tempered, banal. ___________ written for Sunday Muse #228 for the image of Sofia Federova, which I can't figure out how to show here.
Here is the house with the windows made of ether where the woman in the attic is a fine discerning creature to bring you books and bells and birds who speak in cinquains and pave the way to hell with her well-intentioned mind games To chain her or to be her is a problem every dawn brings when you find her on the staircase howling out the aubades she sings to grind you and to gift you her peculiar diseases and then to cure with potion that disturbs as much as eases These are your days in the house of dust and hemlock where the fedoras and the bonnets are designed to send a strong shock that snaps your concentration when you try to understand her while day by day her means of play grow grislier and grander. ______
"Dig my grave with a bloody spade/ make damn sure that the digger gets paid." --Dave Van Ronk Make a platter from my bones and place it upright on a stand in a hutch, that I might shine in captivity like a noble urge. Take the space where I wasn't and the absence that I'll be and fill a lamp globe expanding with my spirit aflame. Can I count on you to do these things? My sweetness, the bloom and nectar of my orchard self is fed by the soot and smear of my failures like counterweights, engines of animation brief as the folding of a fan. Set me like bone china, an after-image, clean silent glinting like a peineta in the hair of summer's widow.
Under my skin between my breasts, the lemon, in its nest of oleanders. On the edges of my dreams beyond the gray flags of melancholy, dahlias, in colorful profusion. In my hair where folded telegrams posture in warning, rooster feathers fall in crescents. In my voice the seductive softness of candle wax, and the sharpness of cane leaves. In my past the anvil and the broken wheel. In my mornings, dogs across the sunlit bed. In my hope chest accordion-legged spiders, gypsy crickets and carnations to heal my eyes with kindness, like silent nuns.
Coal Black's House Of Pain 