A Website of the Radical Imagination
Alison Stone O beautiful a land made safe
and, if not safe, then free
of one more man from somewhere else.
The problem was “an administrative error”.
The problem was Garcia’s Bulls sweatshirt and cap.
The problem was his family’s pupusa business.
The problem was a gang had targeted him for death.
The problem was the majority of Americans didn’t vote.
The problem was the price of eggs.
Horrors that morons chose begin now.
Flag-draped walls are closing in now.
Whales sleep vertically, holding their breath.
Stars blink on. Hungry birds cry Ruin. Now
Artemis is running out of arrows.
Progress cut off like a foreskin. Now
the virus-spreading chickens have flown home
to roost. We bury the beached dolphin now.
In Yiddish, “vance” is “bedbug.” Pols twist words
like dishtowels. Empathy is sin now.
Snowdrops are up
and sickly shoots of daffodil.
For the first time in all my springs
no corresponding trill in my heart.
(When asked if he would visit the crash site, Trump replied, “…what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”)
The helicopter and the airplane crash.
The crash site is outside of Washington.
Who will visit?
The air is dangerous. The land.
The water.
Do they want me to go swimming?
Websites are crashing.
Who will visit?
What’s the site?
Hopes are crashing.
We see
the crash site is expanding.
Our eyes are sore.
Who will visit?
Who will see?
Do they want me to go swimming?
I am frightened.
I am crashing.
The water is rising.
The waves are crashing.
Who will visit?
Who will comfort?
Who will die?
This land is American.
This land is our land.
This land is a crash site.
The water is full of words.
The water is a crash site.
The water is American.
Water can change its name.
Words are crashing.
Will you visit?
We are living in a crash site.
I can’t swim.
Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
Recoil from the headline’s slap.
Scroll through all the phases of her face.
Dig up your own photographs. Decide the auspicious number means she died without pain.
Place your favorite – arms around each other, grinning like fools – on your body where it aches the most.
Hold her pet name for you under your tongue.
Which part of this crimson
honeycomb to eat? And how? Sun
highlights the knife’s blade, stripes the room
like prison bars.
I watch you scoop seeds, then copy;
savor sweet-tart bursts
as red pearls open.
Your food soothes me, your kind,
scratched-by-smoke-and-whiskey voice.
You must meditate, Sweet Pea.
Learn to let go. You’re just like me
at that age – beautiful and charming,
far too stubborn.
Not with you.
Midnight. Teens wander – beautiful, lit, lost.
A homeless man waves his torn flag. Git lost.
How close lie pleasure and oblivion.
Till Roe – missed period, dead rabbit, lost
future. The waning moon makes her wonder
about old boyfriends – cop, convict, Brit. Lost
to time or wives. Renunciates fear their
hungers. The grump toasts, Here’s to more shit lost.
The woman pulled to pieces by her kids’ and
husband’s needs. She offers kiss, toy, tit. Lost,
the free, whole self she once was.
Ghouls in the bushes, bones on lawns.
Leaves reach the height of their fire
and the veil between the worlds thins
toward the only day that I am
once again my mother’s child.
Some people avoid this doom-focused revelry –
children’s faces bloody and scarred,
plastic fangs crammed in their small mouths,
spider webs and gravestones in suburban yards.
But it’s the living who can hurt us.
I’m hollow-eyed from too much news,
my family fractured,
democracy unravelling.
What is the sound of desire –
heart reaching toward nursing school,
time with her six-year-old son?
Pieces of the unchosen future
rot inside her,
turn septic.
The house smelled of cats, mildew, loneliness.
Through empty rooms, the wind blew loneliness.
What a woman knows, she tells slant.
Let men and the sun spill everything.
The moon, too, keeps secrets.
Birds broadcast their news all day.
I Love You, Stormy Daniels
(a tanka)
Sweet the cuffs will close
due to a porn star he said
looks like his daughter.
Cops got Capone for taxes,
too. Who’s grabbed by the crotch now?
[Originally posted on April 1, 2023.]
Hey, ho, make a merry din!
Weaving over, under, laughing at mess-ups,
we circled, flowers in our hair,
ribbons chosen to match our desires.
How fragile — heart, brain, womb, sinew, and bone.
How easily bodies, and dreams, can die.
A woman’s safest when she is alone.
Spooning, our dog and cat doze in the sun.
Tails twitch and amber eyes close in the sun.
Hope sparked by a bright field. Sorrow, the woods.
We caution children, Don’t go in the woods.
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.