Image by Daniels Joffe on Unsplash, used with permission
King Neptune’s Joust
Who seeks to best the ocean’s roar
is just a fool, and no more—
delusional right to his core.
The protection of the knights of yore—
that plaited metal that they wore—
was but a many-chambered door
that led them to the ocean’s floor.
Venus in the Year 2020
She is in us, this woman with a skull face
and feathers for hair.
She rises over the bones of her past
with a slow shield
and a fast axe.
From the crest of her walking stick,
hair streams in the wind
as though head and staff
have traded adornment.
She has painted detachment on her face
and tucked emotions under a skin cloak
shredded by the teeth of her life.
She wears her seeds
wound around her long throat,
streaming down her front
to end in a pendant
made from bones
whose stories
only she
knows.
Behind her and beside her,
the skeletons of her memories
and riches
in hide pouches.
With few secrets left,
she stands sentinel
on the mountain.
If she could fly?
She has plucked
her wings
for ornament.
She
stands.
Respite
Although it is the day lit world that shouts at me, it seems
that when darkness closes, you echo in my dreams.
Monument
A cow is screaming across the arroyo. Fireworks explode in honor of whatever saint’s day is being celebrated this week, drowning out her loud shrieking bellows. It is twelve hours later that someone finds the cow, her horns caught in the wire fence. Too late to save her, they do the kind thing and a single shot rings out. When her owner leaves her for the buzzards, a stench settles over the neighborhood, and we pay a man to cover her in quicklime. It is months later that someone ventures up to find a perfect effigy of the cow—jaws open in her last cries of agony. In mistaking concrete for quicklime, the man we paid to do away with her has instead constructed her monument. Immortalized on that mountain where few others will ever see her, I often see her in my dreams.
For dVerse Poets, we were to write a story of 144 words or less that made use of the line about the screaming cow above. You can read the stories others wrote on the topic by hitting the dVerse link above. This one is exactly 144 words. True story, by the way.
Seaside Soliloquy
Out beyond the breakers, you curl and curl and curl,
until you reach that breaking place where you start to unfurl.
Then you slap your underbelly on the sand’s soft lap.
Clap!
Before sneaking back and under, rolling back out there,
past a reef of coral, without a human care,
free again,
’til you begin
to curl and curl and curl.
For dVerse Poets, Apostrophe (Apostrophe is a poetic device in which you address an inanimate object, animal or a person not present.)
Affirmation
That crepey neck.
I’m going to look like my Grandmother.
But I refuse to wear blue tennis shoes like her,
and when my jewelry starts turning black,
I’ll stop wearing it.
I won’t use straight pins for buttons
or rat my hair and roll it in a bun.
I won’t save Cracker Jack prizes in canning jars
or give all my money to the Seventh day Adventists.
I will not save food in my purse to take home from family dinners,
and I won’t let so many cats sleep in the henhouse.
I Just Get My Religion from People
She hooks one long red fingernail
and her left ear disappears.
She points the nail tip to her thumb
and the table rises into the air.
She wrinkles her nose and the table
comes down but the lights go out.
When they come on,
she’s gone but her shoes are still
under the table,
one toe pointed backward––
one heel broken.
Music shows in the air,
hung there by its black tails.
I open a window, blow
jazz to the corners of the room.
I open the door and her shoes walk
out on the wrong side of each other.
“How’s she doing today?” asks the doorman
on my way out.
“We’re getting her act together,” I say.
Catch up to her shoes at the
taxi stand at the corner,
hail them a cab.
For the dVerse Poets Surreal Poetry prompt.
verseVV
