 Photograph by Grace Fowler. Copyright Grace Fowler, May 2015. Nocturning
The third room along is not content to house our discards the hand-me-down stuffed bunnies and patchwork quilt squares left from mother Our rooms become the girls, the girls we closeted coveted, the floor-spaces close with paperbacks spread open like brooding birds or shoes like empty nests The third room along, the hallway bicycles grow plucked from vacant destinations ambulated home ginger as a schoolgirl cupping a wounded sparrow Our rooms become the neighbours doused of light flames turned in our dreams congregating dust bunnies at the skirting The third room along a glow beneath the door leaks into the night We thought we'd put it out By Reka Jellema & Brendan Bonsack Copyright May 2015  Photograph by Reka Jellema. Copyright May 2015. Water Song
breathe green step from your skin climb in her paintings the slick trunk you shimmy down until your feet touch drip drip rain swollen swamp follow the water- color wetlands sleep on lily pads rest waiting for a dragonfly to land this damp afternoon rinses your skin with a patina of green mosquitoes hatch en masse A girl on a raft lifts a glass sliced lemons surface canoes paddle past lily pads the suck of oar throaty frog habitat waterside cabins where the children separate yolk from flesh Beagles lick a stack of paper plates across the lawn Jerusalem we hear in the word a water song By Reka Jellema Copyright May 17, 2015  Photograph by Reka Jellema. Copyright May 2015. The Neighborhood Howled Theirs was a street of concrete playthings, imaginings, a tractor made of tin, an earth- mover pushing soil from the common garden within the dwellings, fathers made soup from ham hocks, girls wore duck shoes, boys galoshes. fathers in shirtsleeves and flat tops, stirring, stirring whilst in the sandbox sand held the shape of the child they buried, pail and shovel, the mom who sat on a swingset watching him sifting handfuls of sand stuck in a never land wayward eyes circling open- mouthing juggling charred orbs tangled in galaxies sidewalk walkers phone gazers scorn he adored every ship that ever nosed through space made mud pies from dark matter the neighborhood howled at his passing at the Buddha cross-legged and stony, sky- bound paleface. A moon of a ghost, as hard and yellow as a butter lamb. By Reka Jellema Copyright April 3, 2015 |
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