fiddleheadless

The Fiddlehead rejected a batch of poems yesterday:

Dear Ms. H--,

Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept any of your poems for publication in our issue. We did enjoy reading them, and our favourite piece was "Three Women."

Kind Regards,
K----

I expected rejection. I didn't expect feedback. Very good. It is interesting that they liked this poem, and didn't mention the one that always receives strong feedback. Maybe I'll wander over to the black stilt tonight to read it.

Three Women

Old photographs evoke
the affinity to death I feel
in graveyards; the mock
of the sunken plots like the sharp,
flat smiles of black
and white mouths.

Like these three women, burned
into sepia tones, translated
from time to eternity.

The one in the center, in white,
with bullet-hole eyes, white
coat, stockings, layers
of gauzy white like the haze
of memory; in her bag she clutches
the secret of a moment, which always lies
somewhere unreachable.

Suspended like petrified fruit,
these women; flattened
by time, like a stone;
three pressed flowers.

The slice of sunlight under their feet
reaches like a scythe, drags them
to this snapshot, their afterlife.

Time clutches at us, from
the world that lies beneath
experience; the inverse of photographs;
your face in the mirror
whose changes no one sees;

You clutch to roots you believe
are branches, turn the world
inside out like the back of a photograph
against a window
in the moonlight.

The fear of becoming memory,
or worse, to slip out of memory
like an accident;
to gather time within
and leave, knowing.

the heart of a broken story

the storm parts to reveal a new season. the days are darker, but the wind is entirely unfettered, a pure violence shaken loose by the summer sun's incision. A wound so clean there is no blood at all - a scrape like a kiss. Aloneness is like going home - rising up to the sky you always imagined you fell from like overripe fruit. now my languid peach flesh hardens green and huddles roots into its stone. its earthy sweetness breeds comfort's growing vine, twisted around days, like so many sharp sticks, only to turn around to creep down over its own shadow. I huddle inside this great anticipation and my voice echos against its shell. I eat candies and read poetry in a white bed, insenced like a shrine. i seek purity, spun some like some fine sugar in an impossible chaotic tangibility for sinking teeth.

summer scraps:

jun 8: the green leaves spin in the tumult of the rain
the air circulates in discomfort
they sob and shake and dance
moving lucidly, pinned to their branches
trying to loosen their clutch to the root
and blindly locate the sun
but the spindle of the air
winds gray round it like
a spider's nest, cottony lightness teeming with black urgency
the oak's green fingers applaud, applaud
clap, soundless, against the air
whispering: down, down, hush
the great roots simmering
the earth heckles and moans

those on the outside are being born
into sunlight like perfect, gold gods
that crystallize, finally, when the sun
stakes their small hearts in a blessing
their glory filters into my dreams
small inside my nested mind

june 12: the house smells of lamb sausages and chanel. i haven't had a drink in 11 days and am feeling remarkably serene.

july 7: my face, the little circle of madness in the window. . . the madness of trying to sort out the madness of the mind.