What We Tell Ourselves
I. I show him my pay stub my weekly deposit slip reasons for needing ten dollars this is how it has to be This is working nine hour days on my feet barely a break to…
Poetry
The Wrecker Lot
After the latest town wreck, my mother would drive us past the wrecker lot to see the twisted shapes of metal; bumpers and back ends deranged, sharp edges glinting; passenger doors cut away to remove the dying, the already dead—the bodies, we heard, sometimes burned beyond recognition. Evening quiet would…
Being In Your Own Mind
When you’re with, say, your own kind, those toward whom you do not feel a need to prove yourself, to explain the context out of which you speak; being in your own mind’s ease is easier then. No fiddling to find the right word to convey belief in sacramental places…
Willow
Who will make Your long bed, Smooth your grass quilt, fluff your stone pillow? Who will tuck the dry dirt under your chin, sing in my place in the songless night under bright dots of light in the dark, curved sky, sing Willow? Sing Willow. Sing Willow.
“To believe in this living—”
All time is wasted. I withered mine to space, nights imperfecting formulas. Elegance as :—: as being both the church and funk of always :—: always a rumpled coverlet we can’t imagine sharing, having shared. I can’t turn to the way flowers wilt, immediate impulse, toward peonies’ pink lilt, their…
Sap
I ask the tree to register Me and it stings— What for…? Some ridiculous itch Nibbles, hails hate Hiding plain, insight A twitching Claw-gripped pendant Fixed against its Bark lapels. A glimpse and this Network exposed, An almost Ancient urge to lick or for A loam and petrichor Scent, s’il…
Repent, 1999, From the Series Soul Erased, Joyce Scott
The angel made of brush dance sinew dances color up through strokes of muscle: orange from arches up through knees to mid thigh, red from hips to heart out the shoulders spilling over into wings, a faceless pink brown flutter of head. Silvermask, left-handed, raises his shooting arm sheepishly…
Guns As Angel’s Wings, 1999, From the Series Soul Erased, Joyce Scott
Starry night as texture, a wisp above the grave Of the pink boned dead child. Pink as Implantation blood. Faint. A small tan coffin, Its corners like a black girl’s nails two years back. The wisps might form themselves into an Eye above his head, but don’t— Lush glyph of…
Scorned, He Implodes, 1999, From the Series Soul Erased, Joyce Scott
A jutting full of eyes—: an outcropped eye-cropping—: a seeing flame, a mad-seeing tentacle, an unsightly excess of seeing—: an assemblage of eyeballs: eye-quilt—: two eye masses opening out like a river’s tributary. See how he grew a shadow under their gaze over his bones. See how he has grown—:…
He Seems Different, 1999, From the Series Soul Erased, Joyce Scott
High left corner zinnia sun black and white above the tilt…