 A Little Hearth: Snippets from an Unfinished Novel by Reka Jellema
Darkness comes, as promised. My sister, and her canny predictions: You like your water deep, your edges sharp, your face drawn, your fingers chilled, your sky black, your sun blotched, your heart flayed, your legs splayed, your men hard, and so on, Kath wrote. This has to stop. Oh, for crying out loud, Katherine. One day you’ll look up and the lights will go out. And that will be it. Darkness will come: The end of all things. And for what. You’ve buried yourself. Rise up. My sister. Always big on imperatives. But I like her sense of rhythm. She used to say so much. Now she’s silent. This is where you look into the fire. Contemplate this letter. The title of that play Dad read us comes to mind: Burn this. By now, this page is ash. Sew your own shroud. Build your own ship of death. You’ll not listen. Have you ever jumped out of an airplane? There’s nothing like it. You think you’re powerless, and then you’re crouched by the open door of a flying machine at a high altitude, gripping the bar until the dive master tells you to let go. Arching back, you’re airborne, the earth and sky like the inside of a spin cycle. Like something dreamed by Salvador Dali. Here a cow, here a clock with its hands missing. The dive master tells you to let go. In her letters, Kath said the opposite. The trick is to do the unexpected. Remember the monkey bars in the playground in Sutton’s Bay? The way you clung to them? You’re going to want to hang on a little longer, Liv. If it feels wrong, do it. In the dark I’m wide-awake and mole-like. Other people’s windows are little hearths. Go near to them and warm yourself. Inside, a staircase, family photographs of the kids at all ages as you climb. A couple watch blue imagery moving on a screen, steaming mugs balanced on a TV tray. Inside, a red lamp casts red light. It’s friendly. But it’s not about color. Morning is when the walls and ceiling envelope me in their deadly whiteness. It is always cold and thoughts impose themselves on the blank canvases. My mind is a bleak house. Afternoons are worse. I fall asleep and dream of open graves and the inside of a pine box. There is a place awaiting you. Forever after. Partly it’s the coffin and the claustrophobia, but the satin lining does me in. A substance softer than skin. Someone pulled the plug. Motionless. Moonlight white. This is my vision. In the evening, when light dies, dimness warms the little cottage. I stuff newspaper and kindling in the wood stove and scrape a match against a matchbox. Set the kettle boiling. Fill Wallace’s mug with strong black tea and top it off with a generous splash of milk. For it is important that awake people be awake, I hear my father say. Through the glass, orange and blue. Outside, trees take shape. The moon materializes and stars are lite-brites. You know what comes next. The color black. The Smiths. Hennaed hair. Glam lipstick. Goth regalia and the accoutrements: Piercings, drugs, sex. Darkness. Except it wasn’t like that. I stuck to blue jeans and T-shirts. A bottle of vodka in my desk drawer. Reading binges by day: John Berryman. Hart Crane. Delmore Schwartz. Lowell and Jarrell. And so on. Anyone who died young and badly. I read the poetry and I read the letters and I owned their madness, coveted their genius, and knew I’d never see twenty-five.  Photograph by Reka Jellema. Copyright October 25, 2015. A Loom
Her lap is a loom Her hands a steady weft And from the weave a murmuring Of moths on threads unseen, Unheard, she listens for the man Who comes to call, to sit upon the stool Pulling at the cotton til Her fingers find his wrist Cuffed and white and crisp The buttons tightly imitating eyes Tucked away in creases and lies About the place, about the time As though by stitch and by Stitch she could hide him Crouched and hushed and hazardous As a fine shirt pin Copyright October 25, 2015 By Reka Jellema & Brendan Bonsack ........................................  A Wave
The bay greens - the light of day - I shiver keep shivering, Mom's Irish sweater unraveling at the sleeves: I wave at waves - A humpback cracks the sea - lazy shimmer-swims winging the blue-green - the ghost of my brother watches from a wave - Every image hangs like a jewel in the void - seeing, we are seen - and what waves back never leaves. By Reka Jellema & Sean Reagan Copyright October 2015  Photography by Reka Jellema. Copyright September 2015. a love's little scratching
slip into this wool sweater our marriage still warm still green our fingers tangle with the sleeves did you see could it be the cuffs unravel? who can tell us how to snip the yarn, card the wool hold our strands together? we left our mothers at the alter we were cleaved and we are making home this bond something so close a love's little scratching fibers raising blood day after day missed signals and blind eye turned away the cheek I hold soft under my hand this is the way weaving tortoiseshells into our blanket the marriage only we can understand Written by Reka Jellema and Jennifer Savage Copyright September 2015  An Editorial
In memory of Jim Heil We’d like to think it was a spotted gull Some grace of light that tricked the water green That made you turn and paddle toward the moon, Away from afternoon matinees And the newsroom, deadlines and bylines And lame editorials -- you spat them out like sawdust, sought the woods And Michigan. A snowy owl lifts her wings; racoons rut For garbage. At your old place we pick Our objects. Stones from Superior, that bowl Filled with acorns, a button-down Still smelling of your sweat, those Nights, that hospital bed, the countdown To last breaths: We make ourselves at home: There's kindling in the grate good dry wood. The beat cop Makes fire and we sit, hands cupped Round mugs, hands fitted On bony knees like caps. You should have seen yourself, Lord Jim, Sunken. Wrinkled skin- Bone cold What did you expect, Marathoner who lived On carrot sticks? A drowned bird Who'd been in the lake too long. I got the call. November surf, a kayak Spit from a Great Lake, A turn, adrift This life, a lone Gray wave. By Reka Jellema Copyright August 2015  Photograph by Reka Jellema. Copyright July 2015. Black Rain
I saw a robin today, soaked, all black, even its breast caught in a downpour of black rain. A bird unmoved by the squall of electric guitar crashing from the open window of a muscle car. My mind, that cheap crackling speaker, noticed what the bird ignored: A wake of white static dissolving into wakefulness. A man in an icebox drinking coffee black from a Styrofoam cup. A yellow lab frozen to the sidewalk. A black bird inked on the guns of the girl with her psyche in a knot. Hot blood pooled on the pavement losing its red in a pool of white lamplight Where did you go when my wallet closed and I heard the flap and slosh of my heart defect? Why didn't we rise above the drone and hum and sing along with robins? Or tune in, my lost friend, when robins became silhouettes and the city scraped dogs off the street? It was then my mind pulled its drawstrings - closed in upon itself - while clocks tick despair, and You reached for a feather, for flight, for the grip of talons on a wire, for second sight While the robin, blinded by black rain stared away By Reka Jellema and Tzod Earf Copyright July 2015  Photograph by Reka Jellema. Copyright July 2015. Elm
Below me the earth softens and parts, water drips into crevasses mucked with moss. Alien nubs of hyacinths crack the damp soil, a drop of rain crowns a flower bud. Mosquitoes hatch and follow warm blood, the children plumped, succulent at the backyard birthday party, swinging sticks at a piñata shaped like a hive hard candy asteroids, the hum and buzz of the lawn care guys. They say I'll lose another arm, the man speaks of a saw and a hatchet, the woman invokes pruning and garden gloves. "Or we could dig it up and plant another one" Once she wound her body round my roughness and hung on. By Reka Jellema Copyright July 2015  Photograph by Reka Jellema. Copyright June 25, 2015 Blue China Plate
If you shook the earth, if between cymbal and snare, you lifted her up, grasped in both hands, maracas in a band you didn't know you'd joined, how would she sound, s'pended 'tween the deaf moon, a void and a sun overreached with ambition? The view of her from Saturn a blue China plate flung at the wall of space and shattered, pieced back together, cracks crooning at every jolt, an earth-lurch that crunched, a sprung reverb chord coiled and recoiled called upon and recalled Would the cool kids say she sounded seismic? Jangly pop or rock rattling the lithosphere? And who would listen? Who would feel the rhythm in capillaried secrets spread beneath the soil? All the severed ears would crawl like worms suckled on cake dirt dirt caked and iced and sliced uneven into borders bands of shaken brothers still only following orders By Reka Jellema and Brendan Bonsack Copyright June 25, 2015   Photos by Reka Jellema. Copyright June 2015. Homebound
(In memory of Addie, Lillian, Ted, Ida, Henrietta, Gertrude, Evelyn, Vi, Gene, and Harry) When the cows come home we will gather round the commons until sundown fitting pieces of clouds the color of our hair now fluffed and white into a puzzle to pass time stuck on blue sky cut up into shapes with loopy blobs the end an edged perimeter blue scrubs will bring trays with grim applesauce potatoes whipped red jello quivering soft palettes lest we aspirate coughing out mealy yesterdays messing aprons gumming the mush accepting the spoon from our daughters hearing the chorus of remember of who am I? remember connect-the-dots? remember a spring day choking on the lilacs trampling violets following the cow path squatting under sunflowers fingering dandelions on our way to the fields? one of us will rise, go back to the farm where Pa will surely whoop him if he don’t bring in the cows Ellsworth, Michigan, he says it every time, when they ask “where to?” humoring his sundown the restless cast of pink as the sun sinks upon hundreds of acres of corn the dull clunk of cowbell at pasture and barn where Holsteins lift their heavy heads from the bitter grass and mumble home. By Reka Jellema Copyright June 2015  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 |
Archives
January 2018
Poems
All
|
RSS Feed