Morning Centaur vs. Evening Centaur
In the morning, Harriet the Centaur selected her groceries
with a purpose in mind. She plucked the whistle-greens
and the tarot beans off the shelves, pairing them with
walnut milk and pears in their prime, gathered
in the light of the spine-covered moon. She examined
her ferry-berries like a jeweller, her magnifying lens flicking
over her eyes, choosing only the brightest
and best of the fruit that fly the tongue to the skies.
Harriet hauled it all home and kept it cold in the glacier
near her cave, then she was ready to trek into her day.
She hefted her pickaxe with the orcs to carve
more caves in the mountain, to make room for her herd
that would join her come spring. She dug and she sweated
and she laughed with Roar, the orc so named for the way
her voice rumbled like the sea crashing the shore,
but her words remained sweet as ferry-berries on toast.
And when the sun swept its rays towards world’s end,
Harriet the Centaur travelled back to her cave, stared
at her groceries she chose that morning and sighed.
“What were you thinking?” she said to the Morning part
of herself, from before all the sweat and the heat
and the grime. “I don’t have time for this!”
Yes, you do, Morning said. It would only take thirty
Minutes to soak the tarot beans. And while you wait,
You wash the whistle-greens, then peel and mash the pears—
But the Evening part of her scoffed. “Ha! You think I want
To do all that now? When I just want to sprawl on the ridge
and watch the Dragon Brawl? It’s Brandy Fire against
Vodka Vow, and it starts in forty minutes! No, thirty-six now!”
Harriet shifted her back horse hip, then her front human one.
Then a voice like a sea crashing on the shore echoed
Through her cave. “Hey, Hare! Wanna watch the Brawl
and get Cave-Dash together?” And Roar’s face waited
like a bright bird in the heather. No . . . Morning Harriet
tried to say, but Evening outmatched her in a spectacular way.
“How about Toasted Wheatgrass spread with red pepper sauce,
and button mushrooms all sliced on top?”
“It’s like you read my mind,” Roar said, standing tall,
So, they ordered Cave-Dash and settled in for the Brawl.
The Blight in Our Rooms
The hoarding of our neglected synapses, our assortment
of what once mattered, and is now forgotten –
that hornet’s nest of agony from twelve
years ago, when we searched for that
paper for hours and ended up missing the deadline
for family leave for our father’s death,
or when that sweet guy we’d known for years
soured into that fermented concoction of
podcasting asshole coupled with the delicate notes of
echo chambers that we finally managed to forget
after years of repression – those forgotten things –
they grew into something in another dimension,
the same as when squirrels forget where they buried
their hoard of acorns and trees are born,
Those things that we shoved under the giant rug
Of Don’t Think About It, they sprouted roots into the ground
of our collective subconscious and needled into
the dimensions, the other worlds of those around us,
those that walked and talked and smiled around us,
those beings that we pretended around, and laughed with,
and said, “How you holding up,” and we said, “Great,”
those derelict growths caught hold of the rugs of their minds,
and bunched up around their tables’ legs,
and grew, and grew, that abandoned ache of that one night
now aching in their thighs, and too late we realize
when we ask, “how you holding up?”
They say “Great,” the way we’ve have done for so long,
with that forced upturn of lips, that distant look, that folding in
of shoulders, like they’re wrapping the shawl
of disillusionment around themselves while looking out to sea.
And we know that those things we have forgotten,
that infestation of evasion, the sighs, and clenched cries
we hold inside ourselves, has grown over into
those we thought we couldn’t reach. And this is what
drives us to clean out the blighted rooms of our thoughts,
not because it hurts us to breathe in the rot, but that it does
not stop with us, it will spread into other realms where
it did not begin, and so we begin
to care for ourselves at last.
Oh, To Be
Oh, to be a sun-soaked cat,
blinking at
the afternoon,
the worries, they’d scurry
into their hidey-holes
and dare not poke their noses out.
Oh, to be a wind-swept finch,
plumage rich
as a soaring flag,
gliding through the grasping trees,
rising free
of war and rags.
Oh, to be a weightless whale,
the holy grail
of buoyancy,
for though I’d bear the burdens of
the world’s largest living thing,
the depths, they’d hold me up because
I’d sing to them, and they to me.
Perfect Sky
What is it about expanse
That engages our discovery
A mountain range, or caverns vast
Waiting, waiting under our feet?
Why the sudden urge to extend
Into whorls of glaciers’ frozen seas,
To descend the icy depths,
Or climb the sky and drift all free?
The infinite calls to finite souls,
To glide across a grain of sand
On a galactic microscope,
We stand, we stand,
We dip our hand,
How deep does the ocean go?
The question shakes our primal spines,
And lightning jolts our thoughts outside
Of what we think of what we see.
Books and plays show further places,
Bigger skies and larger spaces,
Some of us? We cannot stay
Inside the same old shallow grave—
We grasp for golden heavens new,
For why? For why? We do not know,
Only that we must explore,
We must float through the giant doors,
Oh, the itch to grasp at what’s beyond,
The need to swim in giant ponds
Where the horizon stretches out its arms,
Always farther than sight can reach—
Why do we have this crying need?
Say, if we ever do touch down
And connect to somewhere that we’ve found,
Maybe we can locate that realm,
That cosmic void inside ourselves
And make a home, and build a nest,
And settle down inside our chests,
We can smile at those that sail by,
And wave them past, and tell them why,
Why we kept our perfect sky.
Bodies Below
Let me hold your anger till you can breathe again.
Let me dry you off with a towel of sunlight,
Let me wipe your tears with the washcloth of
a waning moon. I will wring it out into the sea
so they will see the depth of what they have wrought.
Let me keep you warm with a constellation campfire.
Draw your eyes up to connect the dots between
the bodies above and reflect. When will they bestow
the same respect to the bodies below, the earthly stars
and the rooted Mars next to you and I?
When will they regard the autonomy of a woman’s hard
decision with the same religion of just looking up,
with the same faith and leaping to conclusions
That they do to us? They won’t.
Hold.
Let me hold your anger till you can breathe again.
The storm is coming, and they cannot hide
from this swelling tide—from this wrath filling up
The dam of the damned, we will rise—the crest
of our combined disrespected constellations
pulling the current events back.
Your honour, let the record show the worth
and value of the bodies both above and below.
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