Spoiler! :
i.
Even a ferryman
mutes his cries, they say,
as the collapsible tugs on
waves like a child’s hand.
Cast river, iron rod,
word of mouth,
house of God.
ii.
Written in stone,
written with fingernails
and charcoal etched in
walls of veins - vales cragged in bones
as twilight veils the eyes of
a moonlit bride and a gown
starts to smell of seas and
shells. i wrote them every day
on my wrist, the names of those
who lay - shrieking porcelain dolls, stiff
armed and thin lipped bitten deep
in flying spit, sprayed on a tattered
coin as they prayed long
after they had dried. But
in cowlicks of stone,
the driving tide of caves—
a bazaar of Gregorian stalactites,
and against the sea, a sky shears
like a pierced side. All the gulls
sink into waves, like blossoms
into a trout-muscled summer, screaming
and petering out. The caves
yawn, sweep open as gods
who swing to life on the first day
and find nothing at all, craving
bipeds from bone.
We pray too,
forsworn rowers.
We play there -
dreams like tributaries
running down the scope
of a lava flow.
He leads me through tidepools
that churn with dumb blood, down
a steep strangle of stone to the cave
and i can see the cramped little
cigarette butts of a couple bored decades
like the gnaw of mice on saints' bones
scattered in the corner. Sea-breath, cold buttons, his jaw
out of the dark, his breath
warm as horse-fed apples.
Styx is a beast. He screams, beat
after beat, arteries clutching against
the seared boat as smoke gives way to
lay away the souls, spread bare
like butter from the whole to the half-jawed
grins laced on the walls, driven in by
thumbs and crow calls. "i shroud my face to
hide the holes from your wretched sockets,
pocked marked bones clutching on to coins
and lockets as you shuffle forth, join us in
holy matrimony and scream out your stony
husks breathy dry as they come, as
i open my mouth,
gulls emerge, stupid-eyed,
voiceless as chambers
and even so, i have had the most hoarse
ache, the most terrible dream, the frothing of
what Cronos never saw and what you will never see!”
Whirlpools of lust given way to echoes of moans
fomenting plots to jump the dinghy as i
fly through the murk to unload my charge;
i play with the greased coins with one hand -
two, four, six eight souls enshrined in gold - and
in the other remember how mother cried.
Wailing from the back row, Picasso's horrified
face justified as the walls spite the tombs of
the unknown, names on my palms split to the
side, etched into Persephone's forced womb—
iii.
—brought fruit totters
onto a cliff of ripeness, such swollen rocks;
branches bend with weight
like drugged voices. One misstep,
to plummet down
the gate of ivory.
At least you can still
hear your color over
the gangrape of bees - two, four
six, your soreness of half-there
wysteria against brick.
We pray to
forsworn rowers.
We play their
dreams like tributaries running down the scope
of a lava flow.
We pray - two,
four, sworn rowers.
(We play). They're dreams,
like tributaries running down the scope of a lava flow.
Gender:
Points: 1040
Reviews: 1