the blueshift journal

The Great Mouth flicks its tongue

and drinks from me: its rootlet,

fingers half-hearted in the plains’ dirt.

This is how I wanted to go,

winded, struck and drunk by sky. I am a staff

and the cattle are sea, a water-wall of black and white,

galloping V. But, this never really happens.

 

A furious beauty, my teacher says, looking through

the skylight that doesn’t break.

The Great Mouth says I’m clairvoyant.

It’s what I want to hear.  He says I’ll sing,

but I am no singer.  Remember our game?

 

The haul of towels and dolls and Easter baskets

scattered across the lawn like limbs.

My sister’s arms were propellers, her mouth

a fledgling’s, drinking from the storm’s open wormhole.

 

She received the greening sky as the needled face

of a prickly pear. I stayed inside. I was jinxed:

I’d seen a ghost, a girl on the merry-go-round;

I was sure she’d seen me. Sure some god

would dip his spoon of wind into the living room.

Sure he would take my body and make it his.

 

Take it, I thought. Take me, when I watched my sister cross

the street. And later, on the tree swing, when

the branch creaked, groaned, and in the split-second

before it fell, I saved only myself.  I hate

this memory; the wind had come shouting

from her lungs, her asking eyes.  

 

Later, I wrote my wish and slipped the paper

in the rubber neck of a green balloon.

That wish, to open the heart’s airy cavern: no more

to lose.  I held my broken promise in my hands and blew.