by James Brush
Poems written by me.
They drove down from some mega church in Kansas with signs reading, “God hates grackles,” and “Grackles spread disease & crap on everything.” One little girl with blond pigtails tied with blue ribbons carried a sign saying, “No more icky turds.” They marched up and down the street outside the capitol chanting verses from Leviticus about unclean birds, occasionally stopping to extol the virtues of godly American fried chicken and turkey club sandwiches. From their trees, the grackles watched with little interest. They heard the repetitive nuk-nuk-nuk of the chanters and wondered at the rusty-hinge noises they made on the street below but mostly, they preened their shiny purple feathers and craned their necks toward the open sky above.
This went on for most of the afternoon and as the heat increased, the protesters grew more desperate, more willing to go beyond the veil of free speech. One man cast a stone. There was a moment’s pause as the world waited for the grackles to craft a response. Seconds grew to minutes, and the protesters glanced at one another, nervous, waiting. Suddenly all the grackles exploded skyward in a storm of wings and wild hallelujahs. The protesters watched with squinted eyes as the birds flew ever higher, each beat of their dark wings carrying them deeper into the sky and closer to God than anyone on the street below could imagine.
Blinded by the summer sky into which the grackles had disappeared, the protesters fumbled for their signs, packed them back on the bus, cursing the ugly grackles for their filthy ways and for not being blue birds or cardinals. Resentful and wishing that they too had wings and beautiful iridescent plumage, they drove back north, never once leaving the ground.
—
“God Hates Grackles” was one of 3 poems originally published at Thirteen Myna Birds in July 2009. Poems don’t stick around long over there before they fly away, so I’m posting them here for those who may have missed them back in July. This is 1 of 3.
She stood with hands on hips,
rosaceous hair pulled taut
and twisted into a psyche knot.
Her eyes’ prism revealed
an overglaze of reason as she
watched the numismatist’s
logical fingers trace over some
ancient artist’s vision captured in
the obverse engraving. They lingered
on the junk’s rounded sails carving
paths through southern seas.
“These sails should be square,” he said.
“I’m certain this is fake. I’d be happy to—”
Her lips curled in satisfaction.
His eyes followed the incorruptible
ecliptic of the coin’s path to her purse.
He watched her walk away, dull heels
clicking against stained tile, a music
soon dampened by the snow
and city streets. Listening to her fade,
he wondered how she knew the
master forger’s work was worth
much more than the original.
—
This is for Read Write Poem’s latest prompt (#108). Click here to read what others did with this prompt.
I picked two words salmon and binocular and flipped backwards through the dictionary letting my eyes fall on random words between the two I’d initially chosen. I had decided to use 10 words and have them appear in the poem in order of discovery.
Those words were: rosaceous, psyche knot, prism, overglaze, numismatist, logical, junk, incorruptible, ecliptic, and coin.
In other news, as a holiday gift for family and friends, I made a chapbook out of the micro-poems I post on my other blog. I saved a few to give away here. If you’d like one, use the contact form to tell me where to mail it and it’ll be on its way. First five Next three callers.
If I could study these spheres long enough
to see canals as Schiaparelli saw,
or invent for them tragic civilizations
like those dying while Lowell watched,
these pomegranates might reveal
the wildest tricks of the light.
I’d stake my rep on pomegranate people
living out tiny desperate lives,
their doomed world sure to be destroyed
for the jeweled seeds inside.
—
This is for Read Write Poem’s Image Prompt (#103), a picture of two pomegranates. Inspired as much, I think by my recent reading of Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet by William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara, a fascinating history of our understanding of Mars.
Where there were pomegranates, I saw planets. I suppose we’re all a bit like Schiaparelli and Lowell in that we often see what we want to see.
For those who may not know, Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) was the Italian astronomer who first reported seeing “canali” on Mars. It was a trick of the light and the human eye as well as, possibly, his colorblindness, but the name “canali,” which in Italian means “channel” was mistranslated to “canal” in English. American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) took canal to mean artifical channel and reasoned that Mars was populated by a dying civilization building canals across the surface to irrigate the deserts with what little water remained on their doomed planet.
Read what others saw in those two pomegranates here.
Update: Don’t miss Angie Werren’s “planet pomegranate” at woman, ask the question. She too saw Mars in those fruits and wrote an amazing poem.
The day the desert was destroyed, water
sucked from distant rivers sprayed through the sky,
and cars bore pilgrims, dreamers to Mecca,
sedated by slot-machine lullabies.
The stars all tumbled to earth, outshone by
neon casinos and fountains of light
while roulette chances to change everything
spun against the darkest of desert nights.
Now, unheeded prayers to dollars drift down
from the mouths of those ghostlike survivors,
mumbling dreams into urns full of quarters
as taillights depart in night’s brightest hours.
Boys with flyers for prostitutes jostle
the stars, shouted down from celestial heights.
Barely burning, they stagger slow down the Strip
cursing this blaze, this apocalypse of light.
—
I tried to come up with something for Read Write Poem’s latest image prompt (#98) which involved writing a poem based on an image of swirling lights at a fair. I fixated on the lights and kept thinking about this poem I wrote back in April (I think). So this one is sort-of off prompt, but I offer it anyway.
I wrote it for a (not-quite-there-yet) chapbook of road poems called Highway Sky. I’m still tinkering with some of the poems, but two have been published at Bolts of Silk and Ouroboros Review #3.
Some of the lines are lifted from the manuscript of my novel A Short Time to Be There. In the novel, the characters are driving into Las Vegas after a week on the road and find themselves alternately overwhelmed, excited and disgusted by the city.
Read what others did with the prompt at this week’s Get Your Poem On at Read Write Poem.
A multitude of hungry words, scribbled on a scrap of paper, begs for just the merest pittance of the greater meaning bestowed by syntax. I stare and hear their cries, but next to hip, husk just looks like flask, for crying out loud. Besides, it’s clearly an empty one at that. The cat suggests that swilling single-malt could be the remedy of meaning that might make these words conform and stand in ordered lines. Then he knocks a bottle off the bar, which is irksome, but not critical. I mean, what good is a cat’s advice on writing anyway? Sure, they’re decent spellers—everyone knows that—but for paragraphs, they don’t have much to offer. He looks at me with something like pity in his green eyes and asks if I’d like to help him lick up a puddle of Oban 14. I shake my head—not now, I’m working. I clean the broken glass and wrestle those words, but like scofflaw dreams on fitful nights where sleep, forgetting its starring role in the late show of my mind, lurks beyond the limelight in the shadows by the curtains, the words just lie there, scattered on paper, plum forgotten and ignored much like the clover extending across the lawn, dotted as it is with the wrappers of some confectioner’s dreams, reduced now to just the faintest sparkle, piquing only the interest of the passing crows who pluck them off the ground, take them back to their nests and read the lists of ingredients to their children warning them away from words they don’t understand and can’t pronounce.
—
This is the result of staring at the word list from Read Write Prompt #92: Word Gems. I think I used them all. Go here to see what others made of the same list.
The bustling elocution of
the eight-track saints
rattles nerves like diodes
hitched to an electric chair
Rancid impulses coagulate
around anger, another rant
blares from the radio
Car racing homeward
lizards skulking among
dead armadillos on the shoulder
One last chance for a course change
flinging into the driveway
desperate to say, I understand,
forgetting reason frothed to static
going instead for the gun
—
This is for the latest wordle prompt at Read Write Poem (#88). I like these word list prompts because I generally approach the writing with no preconceived notions of what the poem is going to be about. I just let the list of words play and try to see where they land. This one kind of surprised me.
Another of my vulture poems has flown into the world. Check out “Good Authority,” which was published at Bolts of Silk last week while I was out of town.
We hadn’t been walking long when I stumbled over ivy-covered stones. I bent to have a look. Found names and dates from the eighteenth century. Other stones, each with familiar names from the island’s past and dates long gone, lay scattered and toppled, poking up through centuries of leaf litter, soft soil and faded old beer cans.
We learned the difference between
boneyards and gardens of eternal rest
in the hours before the sun went down
Where faces fluoresce in ultraviolet light
stories leapt from stone
two broad-winged hawks
circle overhead and a little
girl calls for help, her voice
coming from, disappearing into
slow-moving creek water
An incandescent spark
between two wires reveals
dead snake
spiders under a bridge
raccoon scrambling away
water full of memory
screams
submerged
washed away
generations ago
resurface
You knew this would happen,
my inscrutable friend.
You knew.
—
This is for Read Write Poem’s Prompt #85: Spooky, which asks participants to respond to a picture of two guys in a graveyard. It’s a cool image and you can see it at the RWP site.