The Mad Girl Could Be the Black Clothes in Her Closet
pressed into each other as the dark is into her. An excess of black velvet, black lace, licorice silks and ebony flowers. No thing has room to breathe. No matter she filled 72 bags with clothes to give away but then keeps pulling what has no color around her. Once light and sun filtered thru her rooms, her hair thick. Once her lips were plum and ruby but color’s been sucked from them and what’s left is ghostly, an iced bud no sound comes from. Her closet like her dreams is dark as Bluebeard’s castle. Bats could live invisibly on the gauze of some dresses, in...
Read MoreReading Norman Corwin Dies, 101
I think of the oak sticks on campus then, probably running across slippery dark ice across the quad. I was a radio and TV minor, afternoons among wires and glass with mostly guys from Iraq and Morocco. Somehow it was always sundown when the class ended. How little it mattered in a daze of Corwin’s words, already a world past like Normal Rockwell’s sketches of small towns that would morph into something so unlike those scrubbed faces long before the Internet’s paintbrush. I rushed thru cold on a day of almost snow fog to a dorm room a color I wished for, pale lilac,...
Read MoreThe Mad Girl Doesn’t Care Much About Much But the Blues
she aches for what’s left out, the last lines broken as she is. She wakes in a sweat of blackness, can’t move. Pain and sadness come thru the window slats. The cat won’t come to curl into her chin for another hour. If she could drink, she would gulp Wednesday away or beg a wild horse to throw her thru the canyons or have some poisonous snake circle her like a bracelet she will never get rid...
Read MoreThe Mad Girl Wants Only What Can’t Stay
the blues man who wrote on the cartoon book she’s in, the only one not in music. She was sure she knew where she could find it but like him, it disappeared. She knew he loved another who wasn’t that into him but in the small room at the colony, he was hers as he is in the drawing a famous artist did of them and the paintings and sketches he did of her nude and...
Read MoreThat Month My Mother Begged to Wait with Her in the Dark
under the blood red dogwood, berries crinkly as skin. My mother whose bed I’d curl into the whole year I was six, woke up dreaming of fire, doesn’t want to be alone. Between the car and the house, shorter than the hallway to her blue room where Otter Creek Falls licked the window. She holds onto the doll, the Lindberg doll I smashed in a tantrum. My mother who’d take subways at night all thru Brooklyn is afraid in the drive way of Apple Tree. Don’t leave me she cries like a child begging for water she’ll never...
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