Fecund by Isa (ink on paper)
These are the five poems I wrote for my Imaginative Writing class this semester. Themes flicker and solidify and after these poetic explorations I am closer to discerning the This-ness of my creative process. Working in multiple disciplines at once allows each area to spill into the next, to contaminate, permeate, and propagate meanings and makings.
Taken and Given
“When did you know you were?”
He stands at my stove
Thick hack of meat bleeding into the cast iron
“When did you know you were?”
Alive? Hungry? Uncontained?
The smoke of steak pollinates his dense curls, damp
Like the fur on the chin of a lioness,
Feeding.
He is a butcher and a dancer
Sculpting bodies into nourishing bundles
Rich and weighted with life (taken and given)
We laugh as we work
Wide mouthed, wide smiled
Set the table
Call them in
When did you know you were?
Wanted? Wanting? A question, not an answer.
Cheeks bunching full
Licking juice off our fingers
Guilty of much
But no longer hungry
Waking
They like it to be dark
I think
Remembering funerals, I have forgotten so many
Rituals that never happened
Undone, not yet done
Never finished
And forever strangely sweet.
I dreamt of an Orca Whale in a small
Lake
Tail waking
To push viscous tension,
A pop-release into air.
A spray of water, droplets cool and sharp
One on forehead
One on each cheek.
Moles are places we have been kissed the most
In dreams?
In past lives?
Or prophetically.
Lending themselves to a present lover’s lips
She forgot some things before
She died
She seemed to live in greener decades
Young.
Cousins and siblings
So many brothers
There with her
For my grandfather, I shapechanged into
My uncle, my dad
Girl to boy, now to then
She? No.
she never forgot my name
route 21 south
they seem fresh,
unspoiled for those brought up
on a palette of sour, stink, rot, red, and green.
not emitting much smell,
the sun being tucked behind a sheet of cloud
leaving them uncooked on the pavement. for now.
a white blaze of road paint measuring them longways
and now we are moving them
scooting their body
onto a blanket to put in the trunk
revealing a moist, dark oval spot that demarcates their
Place.
but then we think.
and we have a hunch burial is a uniquely human ritual.
they might be more delighted to be devoured by birds
piece by piece
into the thin sky.
tufts of fluff and sinew
slurps and stretch-snapping, beak-yanking bites of
intestine, liver, bladder,
lungs.
and maybe later, what is left grounded and flattened by rain will
erupt with the quiver-shift of resurrection
pearly maggots tumbling out of orifice
an invisible hum of the living tucked haphazardly inside the dead
dispersed into many bellies
uncontained
re-contained
cold then warm then cold again
Being Gorgeous
The thing about being gorgeous is this.
This is the thing. And she points to herself like this.
This.
Being gorgeous is like plucking blossoms from each other’s mouths
And deciding which to leave, let grow
Into fruit, luscious and dense
Like a saccharine riddle
And she says to us when we roll around in the grass
Laughing like wolves
Being gorgeous is for all the beasts, micro beasts, super organisms of this here planet.
This planet speckled, dimpled, and dexterously windswept.
And she says to us as we lick our honey-dripping fingers and nibble the
Throats of our dearest friends
Being gorgeous is not easy. It takes guts. And flesh
Unruly and yearning to be underground.
She proclaims these things to us as she gesticulates wildly
Cracking the pavement and busting through chain-link
She whispers these things to us as she deftly dips her pinky fingernail
into the intestines of fish
Scooping out clots of microplastics that she then eats
Metabolizing
like a willow tree in a nuclear waste field.
Like a mother sucking the mucus from her newborn’s nose
To urge their first sour breath of air.
We don’t always understand what she means when she says it, but we nod our heads and ponder with earnest dedication
“Being Gorgeous” we mutter over and over.
“Being Gorgeous”
Tails
The skull of a beast
Large and staring
Pale and dry
Mountains
People with tails
Gods are like us
And flawed
In beauty
And dangerous
And wise foolish
And covered in fur
The devil is not the devil
She is a mess
She is a carcass
From which ghost pipes jut
And galax overtakes
The beasts of the field
Would have trampled armies if we had had the chance
To keep the bison around their bones
Padded by muscle and wool
So they never clank
Or make that sunken rattling sound
So that when they bump one another
The noise is mass and carnival
Weighted in bent grass gowns
And rumble sung breath
Out of nostrils in a skull
Like the devil
A darling of the dirt