Creaturely - Wingednothings

By The End

1/21/2018

BY THE END

No one moment ever knows.
No hour or day wears the same.
Time is not antidote.
Time is treachery.
I have to go.
Leave it to message.
Drop the coat to my shoulders.
Adjust the lipstick.
Half-kissed cigarette in the pocket.
The ghosts come out in mirrors.
I need skin.
Death to flick its shoes off with a toe.
Time is tyranny.
Touch its enemy.
I gather at your door in drifts.
Spoon and kettle sound my drums.
I am the moment.
Let me in.
Let us end this day colored Earl Grey.
Drink to my sin.

~ Written with Brendan Bonsack

The Wine of Araby

12/13/2017

The Wine of Araby

all the lace you've ever seen
in folds along the Seine
somebody bleeds
for every coffee bean
in Yemen

a row of puckered women
wearing bonnets
fingers like toothpicks
a scene from Bergman

lace that stretches
parachute by parachute
over pastures
webbing over bodies
of soldiers

the women bob and dart
like the heads
of Queen Anne's laces
needles in and out
of eyelets

this lace-making
these leaves overlapping
children slightboned,
weaving through meadow
plucking lace for the queen

every Anne
must stop her waving
unlace the laces
begin again
with thread
& sew a web

I was once an Anne
with a clamped face
remember my first lace?

tight tangle
at my entrance
not even your deft fingers
could unchaste

~RJ August 2017

LIFT

12/13/2017

LIFT

why so holy black birds
why does my hollow close
round your cloaked bodies,
plucking my eyes
at every shape that rises and flies,
in the blur of winter leaflets -
just saw crows lift off a tree.
just saw crows fly over me
and tend to the fallen aspen
lifting him by ashen bark
and pallid bud, O crow,
will you carry my body
when my spirit flees?

By Reka Jellema

Littoral

8/11/2016

Littoral

Cliché tinge of mauve,
This dusk's longing is all whisper
and no wolf.

A dusk mothering golden,
hanging on bowed sunflowers,
quieting the buzz of dandelion seeds
with a cloying love.

And how can we, the patina-tongued,
sly the hush
and cast our libretto
past the slimming horizon's bare blue lip;
a chorus in complete otherness.

How can we hymn,
accompanying the end of a day
we have no right to live;

We sing as foreigners
at odds with light-play on dappled saplings
and the whiskers of beach grass quivering the last green

The sea's brine and our eyes to match,
our ballad unknowable in the biting foretime pale,
as we become numb—yet still coupled;
mutable wounds in the weather's touch.

By John Carroll Walls & Reka Jellema
Copyright August 2016

What-If

6/9/2016

Photo Art by Reka Jellema

What-If

(For Bea Last)

If the paint dries,
it dries.
No question;
nothing stays
saturated. A fresh coat? A fence-post?
Canvases crack. The face
of the actress.
But what if
green was more than green, if
green was verdant
dewy,
sweating grass
beneath your fingertips, bottle-glass-green,
smooth jeweled chips
of green glass you find washed
on shore
what if
you pocketed the color & it bled
through the fabric,
what if the gallery called
& commissioned
your blue jeans
what if
the denim faded

By Reka Jellema
Copyright April 2016

hummingbird

6/9/2016

for lisa weatherbee cordero in memory of margery

hummingbird your body was a blur of sparkles pink and purple a little girl in a powder blue tutu & ballet slippers
had nothing on you buzzing round my head making a beeline for the feeder we filled with red sugar water if you know me little birds you know that thirst for the word for assurance for a bulb to break the earth with its green fist & unfurl.....

June 09th, 2016

6/9/2016

Last April Poem

I tried to push him out of my hole,
toad, but he wouldn't go. Too big,
they said, my legs spread
for the poem. This was after
those forced breaths, after
I mauled your hand,
bit a Popsicle stick,
gave someone a bloody lip,
someone in scrubs
cleaned up
and then I got lubed
a word, two -- got through,
nothing like a fully-formed
three-liner
someone put on a 45,
Elvis. Squeeze your pelvis,
whispered the poem. I'm stuck
in your passage.
A cheap shot, no doubt about it,
as his head popped
and stuff gushed...
sometimes a frog sings,
said the zen,
sometimes it sticks out its tongueBy Reka Jellema
Copyright 2016

Before the Aliens

4/21/2016

Photograph by Reka Jellema. Copyright 2015

Before the Aliens
before the aliens came
it was an ordinary day
we kept lights low
tucked the kids in with marshmallows
jarred our songs in wine bottles
rowed them out in the dark neglected night
the bottles a clear blue
mothers skirted from their hoops
the surf sank and
the skeleton of the ocean grew
you died
kept dying as people do
we thrust an oar into the mouth of a burial

By Reka Jellema
Copyright April 2016

Agnes

4/21/2016

Agnes

what moss are you
inching up the rough letters of Agnes
graven on a stone next to a little lamb
of God? The older I grow
I think the more
on tenderness -- Lily
of the Valley, white violet,
tiny blue forget-me-not, remember
the cool hand
grandfather placed on her damp
brow, thumbing
a wet bang back, cowlick,
leaving the family Bible, black
and heavier than loaves
of molasses bread
weighing on those
of us left
by the open grave
under a huddle of clouds

By Reka Jellema
Copyright April 2016

MEREDITH

1/23/2016

MEREDITH

You arrange your attire
dressed in the end of days, a time
when summer sun calms down and strokes the skin
of the lawn, dusts all of us
with amen and shalom

Parts of you we didn't know would fly
are loosed above power lines

your reasons are smoke rings
your answers are punctuation
your goodbyes are wind chimes

This is not a burial

Adam's apple brother, would you swallow
a song? borrow a heron,
a swan, lift-off knees-knocked?

I am your Sister. I am your Mother. Let me cradle
in my knobby arms
the loss you have become

Meredith, I know
I know you are made of stone
I know your fingers are uniform.
Do you know how deep to go,
grave girl?
There's more to you than bone,

that girl, that calico
the marbled fur,
so mossy, so pale,
flirting with the gray
slant of old stones
stuck-up in the yard of beyond
the pale, a marker for every soul

Can we forgo the places they plant us,
under cedar boughs, old elms
that escaped disease?

Meredith, I know
you curl round the holes

rough-tongued
lapping at the grass and blood
and soil,
the tricky flick of feline tail,
a tentative paw
at the groove of your name.

This is not a burial.

By Reka Jellema
Edited by Brendan Bonsack