A Magazine of Many Arts

knucklebone
swollen and pitted with arthritis

a blue marble
smooth but for the jagged crack
cleaving one side

a lullaby
a mother never got to sing
to her newborn son

dog tags
dented and scratched

a baby’s tooth
uncut

she walks through the cemetery
collecting them one at a time

the knucklebone
rolls to her of its own accord
eager

the marble
is a hard lump beneath her foot
sullen and frightened

she kneels in the wet grass
listening to the lullaby
as she turns the knucklebone and marble
between her fingers

the dog tags
lay just beneath the surface
of fresh-turned soil

she has to dig for the tooth
in an unmarked plot
along the outer fence
while the infant wails incoherently
through his trash bag and rags

the knucklebone
goes to the granddaughter
who treasured the quilts
her grandmother continued to make
even as her fingers bent and twisted

the blue marble
goes to the man
walking through the prison gates
a reminder to hang from his keychain

the lullaby
she writes down in a neat hand
on fine paper
and slips beneath the front door
of the heartsick widower

the dog tags
she delivers in person
to the legless marine
and then holds him while he weeps

the tooth
she keeps for herself
she fills her pockets with them
strings them around her neck and wrists
tokens of the lost and abandoned
as she walks cemeteries uncounted
gathering the gifts of the dead

A skeletal couple gaze at their baby’s first tooth.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Colour lithograph by L. Crusius, 1897.
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Dug in under ice, rock,
where stars don’t twinkle,
but remain hard, cold, distant dots.

Look up: Io’s belching sulfur again—
droplets flung across the void,
caught by unseen winds,
rain against the surface.

Europa and Ganymede shoulder
into view, fleeting across the face
of the monster that chains us all.

Squint: you can just see auroras
dancing like ghosts, spirits, around
Ganymede, as the king’s tongue,
radiation-laden, licks his fleeing favorite.

His swollen red eye peers at us
as water-miner drones lift off,
returning to ships waiting in higher orbit.

Here, we’re far from his leering gaze,
his lecherous tongue, his groping gravity.
And yet, we never feel quite safe;
we’re trapped, like all his other lovers.

image by ESO/M. Kornmesser, downloaded from http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1615a/

Her bones vibrate with song.
She is the lute strung with flesh.
You would have to touch her to hear.
You would have to touch her to understand

I am descended from a line of witches
stretching all the way back to the age of fires.
We never burned, but oh, we own the heat.
Coals are ice in our hands, and hearts
not brittle fantastical things that break,
but bloody muscle that fits in our hands.

Her hands are always lined with sand, earth.
She is a pilgrim looking for pearls in a desert.
You would have to follow her to know what she really wants.
You would have to stop looking at her to really see.

I am like the wandering wind, nothing
like all these brave women before me. They
owned the earth they were born on, and I
have forgotten the place where my mother gave me life
and left her own to sing with shadows.
And if Death is my home, I choose not to want it.

Her coat is the sky made from starlight and ice.
She never hungers even if her mouth is always dry.
You would have to think up the well
deep enough to slake her thirst.

I am no longer without shadow.
I am no longer star-hidden, ice-cowled.
Once they feel your flesh, once they really see you,
all they want is bind you to their earth, home they call it.
Shadows form when you stop moving with the stars,
when you bow your head to the sun.

Her bones glow like molten gold,
Her heart as if caught by the lute’s string.
She will take the fruit from your hand and eat.
You would have to catch her shadow in a well to make her drink.

Illustration is Hexen by Hans Baldung, 1508

Who painted the sky
with brushes of fire? In streaks
of cometious flame?
That artist moved
on to another canvas
long before his creation
could be witnessed, seen, admired

Everything we see above
belongs to dusty past
Those splots of light scattered
like Pollock’s drips—chaos
or order? Only aficionados
and art critics will debate

while a student sees points
of light and imagines the lines
between, makes connections,
draws shapes, scrys symbols
Divining the dimensions of destiny

Only a student possesses
such confidence in the face
of monumental impossibility. And only
a master realizes the futility

of over-simplifying the stars
knowing each one isn’t a drip—
it’s a galaxy, crammed with worlds

where destiny is dwarfed by possibilities
too numerous to imagine

and pauses to admire the artist, instead

Sunset By F̩lix Vallotton, 1913 Рhttp://impressionistsgallery.co.uk/artists/Artists/tuv/Vallotton/19-25.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55156972

                            The years
pass and pass, and still she feeds
the snakes in her hair
one by one, wary of bites.
She has forgotten the names
she first gave them, forgotten
just how many bites,
but not her scars,
hard as bronze,
rough as sand.

                            The days
pass and pass, and still she can’t
stop studying the wind-churned foam.
She dons sandals,
sunglasses, a large grey hat
steps quietly into the sun,
steps quietly in to the crowds.

                            So hard
to see the monsters here.
She sips a coke, nibbles pizza,
mourns that fruit doesn’t taste as sweet
when not stolen from the gods.
Children shriek against the waves.
The snakes hiss in her ear.

                            She lifts
her hand to the hat.
Later she will find some living food.
Later she will sing to them.
For now she watches the shifting sea,
lets the salt fall on her lips.
She is only skin and stone.

Monsters Exhibition (Palazzo Massimo, Rome, 2014)‎, photo by Sailko