Rose petals,
windswept
from limp
late season stalks
descend
upon the land
to begin their
yearly rot
droplets
of crimson,
one-time
goddesses
now forgotten
exhausted
from summer
tired
of their own beauty
they rest
suicidal
surrendering pure skin
to coffee brown hues
undersides
to black-spot and grime.
The earth
recalls
a fragrant teardrop,
each bract
a total rose
a late gift to mix
with autumn’s rain
to sweetly perfume the
spent and sleeping soil.
his hands painted me purple
along my jaw, under my eyes.
i would freeze to his rigid words
his dark stare, to a frown
oh my silence
when i could run, i surely ran
when i could fight,
i still took to flight
shame is a ghost
i freeze to the thoughts
of some young days
when i
abandoned her to him.
-
With him boxed in
pinewood, she asked;
Are you glad?
I said; I don’t know enough
about death to answer that.
With the dream in his mind
he stood and wandered from his porch
which had also been his parents porch
leaving the smoking air and
metal clatter of the neon kitchen
to join the dark and buzzing atoms
that made up the terrible night
leaving, to trek along the flattened track of his land
and then to the greater road that led to the river
that might save him
along the track and out-of-sight
moonlit switchgrass cast speckled shadows
across his steps
and beyond his reach the silhouettes
of young pine trees gathered in twitchy rows
like anxious soldiers
he met the wider road with silence
but for his steps and thoughtful breath
and the unse
In the end
through the
dew-drops
rolling down your freckled face
you said
let’s find a place
where things cannot
ever
fall away,
– and I just didn’t comprehend.
By then
I felt only invited
as you surveyed
the broken map
of our histories
so sudden you were
so frantic
to nullify each valley,
to flatten every beating crest
we ever climbed.
I saw, your eyes divine
your blood so urgent
to hammer out
even the minor corrugations
of our pairing.
(By then,
the cold velocity of each of us
had aged our faces
and stole our weight)
So - when upon the table
that yardstick levelled out
your eyes met mine
(for the last
when she utters Manhattan
we silence ourselves
the way clocks stop suddenly
on funeral days
or bodies learn of their true selves
through trauma
her gin laced parable
has the room transfixed:
dry hats on tables,
soil-skinned believers
bouncing between
a place of TV myth
and the honest heat
of the days setting sun
she is here
and she is then.
close and distant
her island city
both expands us
and ages us backwards
suddenly simple
we are folksy and foetal
and pink
as one, we assert to evolve
to wanderlust
like pearls
in salt shells that desire
to become comets
shifting
across the dark sea of night
untouched and unhinged
before dawn
peb
when they finally returned
the house had split along the
outer corners
water had burrowed
under the floorboards
knocking them up and into criss-cross patterns
under their feet
floated furniture had
punctured the walls and
he thought the whole abode had ran itself apart
as if to flee
from a crime
a muddy line
sat neatly across the windows bottom half
so they could both see where the flood had peaked
that night
she couldn’t go to the child’s room
instead she sat upon an old potato box in the place
they use to call the living room
– already numb from
the doxepin
she needed that morning
just to make it back
he walked
Today, I told my class that we would be playing a game. One that required a special visitor to participate.
I had invited my friend Hassain to visit my classroom – he arrived wearing a cotton thawb and leather sandals. He had taken his taqiyah from his head and held it in his hand as he stood and faced the children.
I introduced Hassain to the class. I told the children that this man was named Hassain and that he was very much the enemy of all children, he was extremely dangerous and he was not to be trusted.
The children had never met Hassain before today but because they trusted me, they nodded to my description of him and were tha
Rose petals,
windswept
from limp
late season stalks
descend
upon the land
to begin their
yearly rot
droplets
of crimson,
one-time
goddesses
now forgotten
exhausted
from summer
tired
of their own beauty
they rest
suicidal
surrendering pure skin
to coffee brown hues
undersides
to black-spot and grime.
The earth
recalls
a fragrant teardrop,
each bract
a total rose
a late gift to mix
with autumn’s rain
to sweetly perfume the
spent and sleeping soil.
his hands painted me purple
along my jaw, under my eyes.
i would freeze to his rigid words
his dark stare, to a frown
oh my silence
when i could run, i surely ran
when i could fight,
i still took to flight
shame is a ghost
i freeze to the thoughts
of some young days
when i
abandoned her to him.
-
With him boxed in
pinewood, she asked;
Are you glad?
I said; I don’t know enough
about death to answer that.
With the dream in his mind
he stood and wandered from his porch
which had also been his parents porch
leaving the smoking air and
metal clatter of the neon kitchen
to join the dark and buzzing atoms
that made up the terrible night
leaving, to trek along the flattened track of his land
and then to the greater road that led to the river
that might save him
along the track and out-of-sight
moonlit switchgrass cast speckled shadows
across his steps
and beyond his reach the silhouettes
of young pine trees gathered in twitchy rows
like anxious soldiers
he met the wider road with silence
but for his steps and thoughtful breath
and the unse
In the end
through the
dew-drops
rolling down your freckled face
you said
let’s find a place
where things cannot
ever
fall away,
– and I just didn’t comprehend.
By then
I felt only invited
as you surveyed
the broken map
of our histories
so sudden you were
so frantic
to nullify each valley,
to flatten every beating crest
we ever climbed.
I saw, your eyes divine
your blood so urgent
to hammer out
even the minor corrugations
of our pairing.
(By then,
the cold velocity of each of us
had aged our faces
and stole our weight)
So - when upon the table
that yardstick levelled out
your eyes met mine
(for the last
when she utters Manhattan
we silence ourselves
the way clocks stop suddenly
on funeral days
or bodies learn of their true selves
through trauma
her gin laced parable
has the room transfixed:
dry hats on tables,
soil-skinned believers
bouncing between
a place of TV myth
and the honest heat
of the days setting sun
she is here
and she is then.
close and distant
her island city
both expands us
and ages us backwards
suddenly simple
we are folksy and foetal
and pink
as one, we assert to evolve
to wanderlust
like pearls
in salt shells that desire
to become comets
shifting
across the dark sea of night
untouched and unhinged
before dawn
peb
when they finally returned
the house had split along the
outer corners
water had burrowed
under the floorboards
knocking them up and into criss-cross patterns
under their feet
floated furniture had
punctured the walls and
he thought the whole abode had ran itself apart
as if to flee
from a crime
a muddy line
sat neatly across the windows bottom half
so they could both see where the flood had peaked
that night
she couldn’t go to the child’s room
instead she sat upon an old potato box in the place
they use to call the living room
– already numb from
the doxepin
she needed that morning
just to make it back
he walked
Today, I told my class that we would be playing a game. One that required a special visitor to participate.
I had invited my friend Hassain to visit my classroom – he arrived wearing a cotton thawb and leather sandals. He had taken his taqiyah from his head and held it in his hand as he stood and faced the children.
I introduced Hassain to the class. I told the children that this man was named Hassain and that he was very much the enemy of all children, he was extremely dangerous and he was not to be trusted.
The children had never met Hassain before today but because they trusted me, they nodded to my description of him and were tha
Rose petals,
windswept
from limp
late season stalks
descend
upon the land
to begin their
yearly rot
droplets
of crimson,
one-time
goddesses
now forgotten
exhausted
from summer
tired
of their own beauty
they rest
suicidal
surrendering pure skin
to coffee brown hues
undersides
to black-spot and grime.
The earth
recalls
a fragrant teardrop,
each bract
a total rose
a late gift to mix
with autumn’s rain
to sweetly perfume the
spent and sleeping soil.
when they finally returned
the house had split along the
outer corners
water had burrowed
under the floorboards
knocking them up and into criss-cross patterns
under their feet
floated furniture had
punctured the walls and
he thought the whole abode had ran itself apart
as if to flee
from a crime
a muddy line
sat neatly across the windows bottom half
so they could both see where the flood had peaked
that night
she couldn’t go to the child’s room
instead she sat upon an old potato box in the place
they use to call the living room
– already numb from
the doxepin
she needed that morning
just to make it back
he walked
Dear Emma,
The truth is I'm not a painter.
The truth is I followed you here from that flower shop on Whitmore Street, two and a half months ago. Please, keep reading.
You actually took my breath away when I glimpsed you holding a bunch of lilies in your slender hands at the flower shop counter. You stunned me. That's never happened to me before. I was watching you turning the bouquet left to right, you seemed in awe of the flowers' beauty. Your eyes, your perfect smile, the way you held yourself. It was not a conscious decision to follow you here. I think I was in a trance. I know how it looks; I know it sounds like a
I turned out like my spot-skinned father
and I would twist and turn the dry tall-grass threads
that I found on the prairie into braids of hair
like he taught me,
and I would feed the horses blocks of salt
before they took flight in the bleak twilight of the plains.
I lived in a world of dry winds and cul-de-sacs
and reached the thinking end of things
before I knew I had no-where to go,
and I first fell in love with a girl
who’s handle is lost to that wind
but her brown eyes are sketched to my soul for eternity.
When I left home he stood on the old porch
while the wind chimes sprung chords
across the flat land like a funeral bell
a
Genesis
But for the small purple stain on its border, the banknote was non-descript.
It had a value but men value things in different ways and by different means. It had a value, but its value is not it's story.
It landed on the church plate face up, coming to rest softly on the flat silver base amongst the loose change like it was tossed to the cloth of a gambling table, soundless but with a small sense of resignation. A man paying for luck, a man asking his God for a favor.
It came from the wallet of a small sad man, who feared the Good Lord daily. The banknote was the weekly price of his penance, the bill of sale for those half-remembe
i. Return
Through a dark tunnel
of bent birch and cedar I walk.
Soft moss on cobblestone. Home.
The tilted bird bath drips with
tea coloured rain. Vines snake up
old walls even as the sandstone crumbles.
Decaying gutters sag with sad, welcoming
smiles, heavy with dead leaves
and the fallout of terracotta tiles.
ii. Memory
On her lap, in the evening, swinging
on the front porch chair. Humming
a lullaby, she whispers softly and
marks with a brush of her ringless finger,
magpie and minor, chicken and hen
and then, soft kisses on my cheek for bed.
At the bus stop, she is squinting and waving
and waiting. At hometime, she i
Prelude - The Forgetting
Out here, far away from our origins, where the stars beat their drums of light across the clear blackness, here in the outer regions of things, where the world pushes into new found spaces, leaving behind unexplained traces of wonder, out here matter vibrates and thickens. Here, the taught web of magic stretches and the miracle of Being becomes thin, so thin its almost invisible to us. Almost.
Out here, we forget ourselves.
Inside the noise of the world, we forget that we stood together in different forms at the endless beginning. We lose track of the tiny changes that eons and ages have brought, the minute a
Kingdom
I sit on the slippery stone steps,
at the gates of my Father's heaven.
My back to the cold wall enough,
that men in dusty pants and
mud-laden boots can thump past,
their tired, weary legs fly fast
across my freckled face.
Father inside, far end,
a stool-throned King, his face not fat
but swollen,
and sometimes our eyes meet
through cloud and darkness,
when the door swings open
to let another thirsty angel in or out,
for
in this chamber, the trip from Hell to Heaven
is measured only
by the length of a glass of dark ale
or a honey coloured shot of sour whiskey.
Outside
Angie skips back and forth
across the
We sat sipping grappa as the storm clouds rolled in from the ridges
like the smoke from some great unseen inferno,
the wood walls and shingles of the house complained to us
in low groans,
of the wind coming up hard, through the valley,
and there was flickering light from a candle,
and she told me how light from a prism dissects into different colours that correspond
in some way to our bodies and that all of life was a rhythm
and I believed that part,
and I believed there were stars beyond the sight of man on any grey day
and that they might hold some greater secret than prisms or rhythms
or any question a farmers son could ever
These perfect mud-rusty bricks
once served as the walls
of my Grandfathers old smokehouse -
glazed, split
and worn,
for years they soaked up the scents
of hanging hogs
and throat-slit boar,
of old hoggots strung tight
by their hind quarters
of lamb shorn and split sideways
for an easy carve -
the rich greasy meats
of long, silent winters.
Smoke from alder wood
green and thick,
would drift and dart
from a bent copper chimney
that he placed - makeshift -
on a corner of the building,
the ever eastern wind pushing the clouds
across the cow fields
to the rocky coast,
a silent voyage to the sea.
Today, the tired smokehouse bricks
border
In the tattered corner booth
he tells me Jazz music
is just The Blues on Prozac,
and his brown suit is already his coffin
and the white smoke of the club
snakes upwards towards the lights
like a spirit fleeing
and quietly, underneath this aura, I sit and listen
and my red wine is
something like a lost metaphor I can't find a handle
to place a word around
and through the blackness between us both
he tells me
the story of his Pa, dying so young
and then another of his own life
on the railways of the humid South
where he found his one blessed love
and how he never got the chance
to truly hold her
or time the rhythm of her heart
because the
What I remember of Fall, on the mountain by brassteeth, literature
Literature
What I remember of Fall, on the mountain
(i)
not
linen
sheets
or folds of opaque ice
a trill chorus
of robins at dawn
not stacked wood -
unfamiliar hunger.
fresh splinters or
seldom seen wool.
I do not bring to mind blue skin
strangled by laces
or the futile windows
of the old cabin.
feel of
the breath
of kingdoms;
when new things arrive
they seldom choose
winter
not
a cracked axe handle - last years flint
gone to rust.
silence – stillness.
(ii)
signals of life;
distant campfire smoke
small motions of
coats through pines
gunshot of a falling
oak branch
a new path to the road.
i. Ice
In the first evening glow
of twilight
the hard crush of our tired boots
against the roads black-ice
gives off tiny echoes, reverbing as
we move with reverence
in slow steps
towards
the distant hunting cabin,
the chimney smoke
beckons us,
its low white wisps
call us home.
ii. Evening
Dragging the limp
bloodless deer
towards the smokehouse
the dogs are scouting ahead
their pink tongues panting misty breaths
into the fading light
and above us
a spray of Winters
first milky stars light us,
guide us,
the smell of venison
hits our throats,
wets our mouths.
iii. Moon
A deep-still night of cool air
we sit staring and smoking
by t
Room 17
Lying bent on his back,
blue, bruised.
Tethered loosely to life; red-rash arm,
thinks of his mom sometimes.
Tethered hard to the bed, rubber cord,
arms like maps, veins thick as rivers,
3 years since rain, the drought has cracked the ceiling.
Room 62a
Ticker tape at 45 degrees,
a blue/white prize winning sashay
for the door frame,
Crime Scene Crime Scene Crime Scene
encompassed the chalk body,
that sleeps flat and silent by the entrance, the doorbell
is broken - gunshot holes in the wall like spat tea leaves.
Room 26
Her daughter, Eleven now can't see her homework,
earring's like her tw
The willows are thinking again about thickness, slowness, lizard skin on hot rock, and day by day this imagining transforms them into what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales alongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.
Summer Grass
Roo Borson
Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida
Current Residence: Annahoriasticin Favourite genre of music: Country or Western Favourite style of art: Literature Favourite cartoon character: God
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