I have just thrust my fist through
a glass window: the lanky and lithe fallow-skinned
young stranger to whom I have just spoken
about the dying river stares at me, curious but unaware
of the millions of tiny glass shards that rain down
upon the grass at our feet. I breathe some of them
in: they unite to form a ball of jagged diamonds,
bloodied with guilt, sitting just above my larynx. And
I can barely swallow. So I detonate
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Category Archives: WWP Prompt Poem
Aanteekwa Learns the Meaning of Her Name
The young Indian man makes his way past
the crowd of wigwams, the barbecue pit where
the women are cooking this evening’s meal, and
the old man leaning on one of the wigwams and
staring into vacant space. Helen turns and sees
the old man, drenched with sweat, his skin dotted with
red circles like tiny targets aching for practice, but
the young man beckons her again: Come, I want to show
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Through the Looking Glass
Helen falls asleep yet again in the large easy chair
in her living room. The Guidebook to Native Americans
of the River Valley lays in her lap, open to a sketch
of a young man, one of those who called themselves
the downstream people in older times and settled
near the great river long before white or black souls
rode its backbone up and down the land or even
drew breath near it. He is nearly bald, with only
a small black pennant of hair affixed to the back of his head
and a river of beads bisecting the bare brown hill of skin
near its apex. Rings of beads hang from his ears, his nose,
and the buckskin coat he wears. He faces west,
towards the great river; and once this chair, the book,
and her body melt into dream, she, too, faces
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Beware of Poets Bearing Gifts
Helen stands alone, drenched
in the ink of midnight punctuated by a few faint stars
and a proud, brittle moon sitting as the
unveiled and defiant queen of this landscape. A black
and unknown bard emerges from behind a fragile veil
of shadows: she almost recognizes his face,
a carved brown rock monument of deep lines and curves,
from the page of a book she’d read in high school. You will
need this to see and hear, he says as he
reaches a long bronze arm above his head
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Debutante Emily Looks for Buried Treasure
They lived on Seventeenth. The Negro
steel mill workers, these new men recruited
by ashen-coated promises of gold moved into
these little one-story brick boxes with their
families: and Helen’s was no different. Helen
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Liftoff
The heels of Helen’s feet –
smooth brown apples in the sun
gravid with forbidden knowledge –
do not need wings. Humans are not
supposed to fly, but she will. She just
doesn’t know it yet. She’s running
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Home
Tree, reach a bold, electric violet-white arm,
an arm scraped bare of skin, up to heaven! Let
your lithe limbs sing bioluminescent
against a thick pallu of sky which is
woven at dusk and studded with a single moonstone.
Let your nude body shine like a tall-shouldered ghost,
pallid and hungry for stars and souls – and all the while,
dear sycamore, curl your stiff, skinless fingers
around a few inches of evening silk and pull;
reveal the scandalous shoulder that Ratri hides
from the eye of daylight!
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