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Leprosarium
08:31 Mar 31 2008
Times Read: 1,419




The graveyard yawns at my question,

Flexing its jaws beneath the live oak.

"What makes a ground holy?"

It sounds tinny and faraway,

Like a golden-age radio announcer

Lost in the static of these old walls

That nursed and imprisoned

The lepers of Carville.

The last Daughter of Charity

Remembers an old man

Stooped over the photograph

Of a wife well-loved.

"Holy ground," she says.

This is holy ground, sanctified

By struggles and hearts pouring out.

And I walk these halls,

Wondering at those who stay.

I shrink from the surreal truth

Of an old woman with no fingers

Who pedals her bicycle indoors,

Smiling at me as she passes

And turns the corner

In the only home she has ever known.

But she is home here

While I am a ghost with a question,

Walking the holy ground

Of the lepers of Carville.

Faith, The Best Untold *
22:41 Mar 23 2008
Times Read: 1,515






My fingers brush lovingly across the clean sheet,

Textured cotton paper and flesh, reacquainted.

I inhale inspiration and the mingled smells of paint and acetone,

A few light strokes of beloved pencils and I am home once again.



I sketch goggled men standing rank and file, focused

Not on the birds flying in widening circles close overhead,

Nor on the planes, which tip their wings, roll, and roar away.

I quarter each face, eye coordinates plotted to the mid-line.



Render, shade, and smudge, mindful always of the light.

These many days my body screams in protest, crying out.

I arch into a back bend and wait. Listening for the sapling

To reach up from the earth and spear me to this place.



I will listen to the thrum of earth’s words. I hear them

With the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet

And I know inside myself, where the world is wild and young,

Art is not “what you can get away with.” It is the now.



The now of a woman fainting on fur blankets beside a Roman pond

And I have no idea how to tell you I love you.





*title inspired by Walt Whitman

Fever Song
18:24 Mar 10 2008
Times Read: 1,636






Windows are thrown open

On this, my sickbed day.

Sweet Olive breeze pipes a Louisiana tune

Charming my symptoms away,

Single file like the rats of Hamelin.



And drowsing here in my room

I wish for my mother's hum,

Warp and weft along my loom,

Her softer songs of things to come,

To weave a warm and woolen afternoon.



I play a game with the ceiling fan blades,

Blinking them backward in time

Where a Grandfather's coffee smell lightly fades

And I can nap in the cradle of a cajun rhyme,

"Tu croyais, il avait juste toi dedans ce pays."

PRIVATE ENTRY
05:46 Mar 10 2008
Times Read: 1,655


• • • • PRIVATE JOURNAL ENTRY • • • •

Anoxia, Née Moon
09:03 Mar 04 2008
Times Read: 1,914






You loom there still, fingers pressed into my forehead,

Face red with effort while I list to the side, slipping

As my sanity breaks, last thoughts surrendering

To the edges of your features which blacken,

Melt, and spill into my mouth.

I am choking on your frown, trying to swallow

Your thick and inky rancor.

I have never fit your mold - until now.

My skull is crushed into a moist, brown,

And organic mass, my lungs squeezed

Too small to draw even one last breath.

You carry me draped across your arms

Like a fainting Fay Wray to the ocean waves

Which wrest me from your embrace

Into the warm amnion of my new birth.

And I am Venus, suckling the salty sea,

Pleasing to your eye at last, transformed.

My gown spread wide and mermaid-like

To bear me up a while, til heavy with drink,

I am pulled down from my melodious lay

Inside a womb to ever sleep my day.