 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
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
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 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  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 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.....   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  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
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
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 |
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