A Website of the Radical Imagination
Alison Stone He chose friends for wit, his bride for beauty.
She always erred on the side of beauty.
Punk soul in a Father’s body, Hopkins
wrote the motley an anthem –- Pied Beauty.
Mary Oliver’s speaker walks with awe
through the world. Dickinson’s died for beauty.
“From the inside.” “Eye of the beholder.”
Well-meaning parents lied about beauty.
When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.
Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.
The lives we didn’t choose meet us in dreams –
teacher, pilot, maker of origami doves.
Landscapes morph or disappear
to house wishes our day-lives hide.
To be reborn, break the caul of the past.
Take off the moth-eaten shawl of the past.
This moment’s open doors and empty rooms.
Portraits, mirrors line the hall of the past.
Cow blood on the sheet can save a bride’s life.
Danger of scripture, alcohol, the past.
Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.
Even a mirror
can adopt the Male Gaze.
Hospital, pet, concert, third grade crush.
How is it decided which memories last,
which fade like Krazy Kolor from a punk teen’s hair?
I’ll never forget the beagle shot in Daddles.
(a found poem, except for line 4)
When the rubber tree-tapper did not return,
her husband searched and found her sandals, jacket,
headscarf, and work tools.
This is not a metaphor for capitalism.
On John Lennon’s birthday,
a flood of tributes and grief. I keep
my it-could-have-been-worse relief
to myself. True, any homicide’s a tragedy, the loss
of a great talent even more so,
but it was Bowie who gave my odd
teenage self permission to exist,
hot starman I both lusted for
and yearned to be.
The killer got his list down to those two.
The boy fears monsters, things that creep at night.
Beds half-empty, the widows weep at night.
I walk with my mother through a moonlit
town only accessible in sleep. Night
holds its prisoners tight. So does guilt. Too
much vodka – our clothes in a heap that night.
Sometimes I regret teaching you words,
my daughter laments when I use kin
and stan in a sentence
about Emily Dickinson. One perk
of having kids is stepping
into culture’s river at its current point,