Crying for Help
There are signs everywhere. Earthworms scrawl help on asphalt.
Geese inscribe sky,
delicate calligraphy, black ink help.
Mother is dying. Children today can’t read cursive,
all these messages written by hand. Mother reads Her death;
earthquakes of pain,
blood the colour of mudslides leaking. The signs, everywhere.
She grieves; the children are the dying. Illiterate, full of the greed of starlings on suet. Anguish, Her voice
screams, a stooping hawk, rabbit in talons
a broken neck, acceptance. Death’s prayer.
All children are rabbits.
Mother shouts cursive poetry, stanzas-floating rafts
of dead crabs, a letter scrawled, red algae on beaches,
in the prose thunder of an iceberg splitting into the sea.
No child deciphers.
Why did You write this illegible script, you ask the sky
above maples behind your house. Even a cubist poem is easier.
And the maples drop sugar,
forsythia throws away blossoms in autumn confusion, tears for those babies, all the bed-time stories Mother will never repeat.
Until algae and lichen, mosses fur cracks between lines,
a single digit writing with left hand,
three dimensional poem, emerald, turquoise and suddenly
a sun of ripe peaches shouts hallelujah
lush, dripping honey and bees,
a song,
survival.
Revenge
Earth— veins’ blue rises through snow.
Spruce knuckles drip mud.
Grip. Let go the feather pinched between your teeth,
the one where she walks like a woman, speaks a man’s rasp.
Thaw.
Cracking ice. Clay lines the brook bottom
like silk, a silk so pink and soft, slip oozes between
your gripping teeth, roots and your veins throb, batwings
before the moon.
Wolf moon talks in a man’s voice, but oh, that dress
and when
you press up against the trunk
under bark’s prickle
hardness,
a low slow heart.
No, he said, fall backward.
You don’t fall.
you are a lidded bat
ready to sing the mosquito
that stings you, you are sonar bouncing
off the moon’s girlish face,
getting even,
losing your virginity
On a Beach in Greece
You spit
out the speeding car window and it backsplashes
into your eyes and the car swerves as ridiculous as a read text,
right front tire hangs up in a ditch.
The stench of rot floats over your unconsciousness,
airbag embraces you like the Pillsbury doughboy.
Your battered brain tells you; bread bakes in the dimension
between
spit and death.
Death’s door sways open,
a woman’s hip, invites you to bury your face
between breasts/thighs.
You hover naked waiting for rescue, love,
waiting for resuscitation. Music trills, not bird song,
a red iPhone half out of your pocket with your comb.
You spat into the flowers that time from the balcony,
lied to your mother that,
yes, you were watering her roses.
Car creaks, passing gas, a fragrant rainbow.
You decide to grab one shimmering end, pull yourself
out the window one step after another up to your ankles.
You wonder, where are my feet? Will there be a funeral
for the amputated, will the broken lie in a shiny steel bowl
chuckling blood.
Will the rest of you follow the rainbow to the moon, still
searching for those feet/her breasts/that dough.
Horses gallop past, mahogany muscles scream so
like a woman’s consternation.
How to ride this new path from car in a ditch,
sputum-blinded eyes,
hand over footless hand, up the glorious rain,
bowed into a refraction of colours. You never guessed
a soul is woven light waves needling through blue
over burning sugar, the rooster’s warning
to an overhead hawk, red; dive here,
die here.
Entombed in their shoes your feet rest on brake and gas pedals.
You reach for them your hand falls away, bound
by laws of pulsating colour. A tone as pure as a singing bowl
grabs you by the eyes. Nothing else matters.
An inchworm measuring a twig.
Green coaxes your soul, it’s wings translucent and hover,
long tongue uncoiling to suck nectar from a zinnia.
Such thirst-two hours sipping sugar,
a cricket frog lives in the fountain beneath zinnia petals.
You spied it one day on the far edge of the dawn lawn,
surprised at his long, nocturnal journey home.
A soon morning after frost, you know that frog will no longer spit water. You’ll till earth with careful fingers, mulch unspaded because one October you dug up a tree toad nestled deep for winter,
too chilled to try to escape. You patted her back,
covered her, extra humus,
dead leaves’ burden of sugar.
All winter, you will wonder every time
you limp past that ditch if a frog sleeps safe
as a spat poem, meaning curled into itself like a small, cool moon,
a slow heart beating that keeps time as the wheel turns,
engine ticking the seconds, the languid winter minutes
until the last line escapes.
Women’s Bodies
The woman’s body was furred, except for the breasts where clutching fingernails, rubbed the fur away, bald and pink and cracked nipples
Fur scented of sun and wind and deeper in of the floor of forest wet around decomposing trees, hosts to families of mushrooms, shelves stacked fungi.
I stand with my neighbour by the mailboxes, my bad knee jammed into its compression sleeve. Our birthdays a few days apart 60 years ago. A phalanx of firm muscular women in running bras strides by, glossy yoga pants, smart phones strapped to their biceps, ponytails, pulled through ball caps.
There they go, I think, bald and clean, the brunette lips ‘hello’ to the two old ladies standing in cat-hair-covered sweatshirts by mailboxes in the wind.
Oh, they think the moon wants only blood. Have they forgotten silver? I catch my melting body’s wax in the mirror on the way to the shower.
Groping for the privilege of my age in spray, fumbling the future in dropped soap’s hollow thud. Everywhere dangers, throw rugs, thin blood, a headache could be a stroke.
I read poetry at Jennifer’s funeral, danced among ghouls beneath a pink sky. The band played Dave Matthews and rows of grills spit out burgers and hotdogs in pot-fragrant air. Water, shivering in the sunken pool-lights.
I am lucky in my waxen body-aches, fears, every night I celebrate with Lucille that everything that has tried
to kill me has failed
this day.
Rachael Ikins is a 2016/18 Pushcart, 2013/18 CNY Book Award nominee, 2018 Independent Book Award winner, & 2019 Vinnie Ream & Faulkner poetry finalist. 2021 Best of the Net nominee, 2023 2nd place winner Northwind Writing Competition. A Syracuse University graduate. Author/illustrator of nine books in multiple genres. Her writing and artwork have appeared in journals world wide from India, UK, Japan, Canada and US.
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