I need to read more
books on a woman’s
body, leather-bound
or cloth, books with
gilded pages, aromas
(dust or new ink)
and real weight,
words I can taste
like menstruation
and semen swirling
together, like shell-
fish, like sea, words
that roar like surf,
break salt-spray, cry
like dolphins, words
that jellyfish-like rise
and fall as a mermaid
above me, wave-spun
of glittering scales,
ambergris-heady,
pages slicing tongues,
drawing blood into
the tide, blood
into seaweed
with all her flashing
fingers, pages groaning
like old, wooden
fishing boats, pages
with hollows where
the wind can sing,
where a man can
vanish just long
enough to finally get
out of his own way.
A northern
New Mexico wind for the first
time in
two weeks speaks less loudly than
sunlight
and overnight, it seems, Raton’s
ravens
have doubled their taut vocabulary,
hopping
between branches in symmetrical
dances,
jawboning. Patronizing the Pappas
Sweet Shop
for the first time since moving
here from
the cold, shady side of Colorado’s
Bear Creek
Canyon, I sip a tall sarsaparilla
while
awaiting the Hatch green chili burger
I ordered
medium-rare, my back to the loud TV,
reading
Anne Carson on God, E. Brontë, Sappho
and a
warming Earth, waiting for Rome to fall.
It’s odd,
walking
home from
work
in the dusk,
the
traffic
behind me
on this
narrow
canyon road:
I can’t see
it coming.
Death will
either
take me or
respect me.
It’s a
strange-looking
thing, this
scrambled
bridge,
mutilated
by last
September’s
floods. A
pickup
charges
past, a sign
in its back
window
declaring,
simply,
“Donkey.” A
bath
tub rises, a
stuffed
lion’s
padded feet
caught in
barbed-
wire,
daisies white,
daisies
yellow.
Dead wings
dissolve on
the gravel
shoulder. A
well-lit
man lies
content
on his
rainbow
hammock,
crossing
his ankles
and gulping
a beer in
fits and
starts. His
golden
retriever stands stoic.
Ponderosa Pine
He buries her where she won’t be found, where the ubiquitous sponge
of reddening pine needles carpets the porous, gritty, granitic soil. Aided by a
windless calm, over the span of several days he meticulously arranges a grid of
poetry, individual leaves pressed into the ground as seamlessly as the uneven
contours of the forest floor allows. The nurse who wakes him to take his vitals
and measure his blood sugar thought she heard him crying, but finds him
snoring, instead.
WagJaw #15
Cube is about knee-high,
a bluish crystal. Its ladder
reaches the clouds, unsecured,
yet stable: though it lists left
ward, made of some sort
of hardwood. Palomino
mare, unsaddled, rears
and races. Yucca blossoms
dot the afternoon. Indian
paintbrush, cactus flowers,
too, scatter in all directions.
Storm breaks violently,
but ladder and cube silence
themselves in a shaft of dim
light. The desert drinks greedily,
blossoms open before my very
eyes. I hear the rush of flash
floods from nearby canyons.
PADMA J. THORNLYRE - 62-year-old Padma Jared Thornlyre moved to Raton, NM from Bear Creek Canyon west of Denver four years ago. The most recent of his nine books were the four-volume Anxiety Quartet (2020-21), Mavka: a poem in 50 parts (2011) and Eating Totem: The Mossbeard Poems (2008). A member of the Fire Gigglers, poets and musicians who camp together every summer and sometimes perform together, too, Padma is also the Editor of Mad Blood, an "underground" literary/arts magazine about to be revived after a 15-year hiatus, and the primary book designer for the poetry co-op, Turkey Buzzard Press, about to publish its 34th title, Dancing at the Crossroads: The Final Poems of Michael Adams, which had for seven years been gathering dust on another editor's desk. Since 2011, Padma has labored on his first novel, Baubo's Beach, at a snail's pace: it's a narrative weaving together a lifetime's worth of remembered dreams. He says that spending so much waking time exploring his own unconscious, oft-dazzling and however fun, is emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Padma lives in a 900-square-foot double-wide with Sappho, Juliet and Kiki, his cats, where his personal library competes with art by his many talented friends for wall space.
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