i've been gone too long

took a little break from writing but my notebook has started following me around again



The Crazy Lady Next Door: christmas 1995

I stared as she trudged through the yard,
a tree planted over her far shoulder,
the wind fighting for tinsel and scarf.
She dropped the ornament by an old elm
and knelt to cover everything green
beneath the fallen snow. It was all there:
the colored glass balls, ceramic angels
forever posed in youth and wisdom,
a tarnished star still clinging to the top.
After finishing, she recited several words,
pulled a dry lilly from beneath her coat,
and tossed it over the new winter grave.
That spring, the tree remained untouched,
and the branches had begun to bear rust.

Magic Fish
39"x 32"
acrylic/canvas

Cold seeps

I would have posited longings ago
this short-shrift to-do over such a curt list undone
was inconceivable
outside
the pages of deceptively practiced perceptions
published in a pop-up book smirk,
or beyond
the canary-yellow frames of a cartoonish
distortion relishing its mired but spongy giggles

A
Been-here-all-along,
you’ve-never-bothered-to-look
lake sleeps implacably
at the bottom of an irascible ocean

Be
Whatever it may,
you can’t deny the wantonly
watted life teeming pretty as it pleases,
untroubled by a hollow-core belief
or the extremest demands of our foul temper

See
How I could have,
if I’d only swallowed
those bubbled-up blurts
ring-wronging the tip of my wriggling tongue,
never been audibly
landed by one alluringly barbed certainty

There are supine bodies—
stagnant, quicksilver pure—
no material ship navigates
and no intentional intruder can swim
without
emerging atypically
unsettled by the caustic exposure

Tread lithely
when you go;
this shoreline bites.
Its clustered rocks will snap shut around you
after digging in below you with a protruding toe,
and its carmine stalks will sting you
as they writhe past you
to mime a part-less goodbye

Here be where
the monstrous cold seeps
and a hellish hot vents
in compliance with this centuries-old complaint:
too-short was the time we wept
for those wiggly wonders
we could have kept
if we’d only octopus-arm embraced
the inevitability of their bandy-legged escape

Spun

digital photo

Ephemeron

It happened so quickly,

the way her love shattered

into a thousand fragments,

each a tiny mirror reflecting

a magnificent sunburst,

blinding her soured vision forever.

And all she had done

was ask him,

ask him in a quiver,

'Did you fuck her?'

to which he lied,

the bastard slipped,

so that the truth hit her.

She knew it was over.

Zaina Anwar 2010