Saturday Morning Features - 7

this is a weekly feature in which i select ten phenomenal literature deviations that have recently caught my eye. if you have been featured, please this journal and read the other works. now, onto the main event—


Wisdom     In the spring of life
     I explored the peaks,
     The swelling hills and cols
     Whose lower slopes are clothed
     In soft fragrant herbage.
     
     Now with autumn in my bones
     A sweeter empathy I feel
     Among more gentle wolds and dells
     Where soul and body intertwine
     In mutual joy and ecstasy.
"Now with autumn in my bones
A sweeter empathy I feel
Among more gentle wolds and dells
Where soul and body intertwine"


GECKO LADYWhen Time has stolen the blush from my bloom
and my skin has withered into creased crinoline,
I'll be the loony gecko lady people gossip about
when they see me-climbing a tree so I can catch
a stray beam of sun in my teeth-or basking at
Midnight-soaking up a shot of lunar brilliance,
I will dwell in a room concocted from the stuff
of poesy and live off of chocolate seashells,
I will be the neighbourhood eccentric who
shuns people and is only gregarious with geckos,
who never wears panties or carries an umbrella
and howls at the Moon-even when she's sleeping
at the break of noon, I will laugh for no reason
in the elevator and never dust for fear of
disturbing the spiders from their cobwebs.
I will be the crazy lady who keeps 23 geckos
and gives them names like Hibiscus and Hyacinth,
Cadbury and Cappuccino, and writes poetry with
a gecko named Peaches perched on top of my head,
I will talk and sing to them, shower each one
with kisses until they're wearing my lipstick too,
Ginger my best
"I will be the crazy lady who keeps 23 geckos
and gives them names like Hibiscus and Hyacinth,
Cadbury and Cappuccino, and writes poetry with
a gecko named Peaches perched on top of my head"


Note To SelfTruth is, I don't know anymore.
Every string, unwinding, unweaving.
The unlikely demise of a tapestry.
The tapestry.
My tapestry.
I'd like to remind you of… well, a lot of things.
Everything.
Everyone.
And I'm sorry, but there's no theme.
No message to be had.
These are just words.
I am just words.
"I'd like to remind you of… well, a lot of things.
Everything.
Everyone."



"On my lunch break today, I went down to the cemetery and sat there for just a bit. I picked the dead leaves off of your grave that fell from that dogwood at your feet. Surely the spot I've come to sit at will feel more like your porch come Spring time, but I don't see it feeling like home. No, ma'am, I don't have a bit of faith in that. I don't have faith in much of anything, really. I don't know if I just never found God or if He never found me, or if He's no more than a really well developed character in the most toted around book of all time. Still, I'm not a God-fearin' woman, by any means."


Fever DreamSometimes in dreams
I watch the woods
fill up with snow
as did Frost.
And I pose myself the
question, what would be
the cost
of leaving behind the city's lights
and vitality
to join with nature and shun
humanity
but just to think such things
brings a shiver
these are just idle thoughts
like those of Miniver
For who am I to change
the road that's been given
is fate the only thing
we should believe in?
"these are just idle thoughts
like those of Miniver
For who am I to change
the road that's been given"


in my sister's carSitting in my sister's overcrowded car, amongst depressed and withered chip packets, and long forgotten jackets rung around with stringy, unhappy fur.
My fingers and lips are stained, sticky, multicoloured - redyellowgreenbluepurple from the rainbow coloured candy cane I'm sucking. It tastes sugary, false, and despite the slippery saccharine of my saliva it has turned my mouth into dryness that longs for water. Yet somehow this candy cane is real, and grounding, and visceral. It brings me back to my childhood, and I like the nudging reminder that I am a person with my past behind me.
Music swells. That is real. I close my eyes against the harsh gold of oncoming sunset, let it permeate and redden its way through my eyelids. That is real, too.
I need reality now, I need candy canes and Coldplay and sunsets. My mind feels lost, disconnected - illness lingers, and my brain has not yet learnt to see. I cannot remember ever seeing properly, but I must have once, because all my life I
"Music swells. That is real. I close my eyes against the harsh gold of oncoming sunset, let it permeate and redden its way through my eyelids. That is real, too."


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"Once, I believed they came here to die,
knew to lay down with their late kin;
I know now the rancher and his boy drag the carcasses
far from the barn and main house
to keep the coyotes at bay."


:thumb343279862:
"18. i slipped on ice, and you cradled
bruises in your arms   you cradled bruises
you cradled bruises on my arms"


windstorms and labworkafflatus, inflatus, my morning globe,
as lithe as your impermanence.
and home! dread homes! are rabbit dugs,
spoonholed piles of mexican brick
where nothing ever touches down,
nothing here alive receives
the plains’ poor offering of gypsy light,
the ugly wind that meets the mudline.
[metaphors]
1. a mottled fence
2. and how these storms hold faceless teeth
that slat their eyes through butter-wood
then purge their guts on wintered florets
4. some freshly headless nativities,
their polyethylene skirts upturned
from violent sacks
5. and knowing i’m a souless
speck
             i lick at what is manifest
        beneath your hair
   each poison tab
a colour
acid
fire
  or lake
     a brothel
         and religious studies
i know, i know you never mean
to murder
or complete
me
but do not say “live for yourself”.
i’ve come online to see the god
that came before me.
we are so poorly married
like bookend spines of Plath and Hughes
up on the shelf
are somehow
synon
"[metaphors]
1. a mottled fence
2. and how these storms hold faceless teeth
that slat their eyes through butter-wood
then purge their guts on wintered florets
4. some freshly headless nativities,
their polyethylene skirts upturned
from violent sacks
5. and knowing i'm a souless
speck"


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"No, now I am
laundry baskets and
accordion files, my
ribs lined up neatly in place. you cannot
call me a skeleton now."