Let There Be

Let there be darkness so I might sleep

beneath the dead distant stars, their slow light

navigating this leaking wreck

so I might believe in solid ground.

Let there be land at dawn so I might love

the rot and lay upon it.

Let there be.

Let there be.

Let there be some refuge there.

© Ami Mattison

Flickr photo courtesy of Libertinus

For G-Man's Friday Flash 55

Dying Leaves

The dying leaves

                             lie in dense drifts

across the fenced space behind my home.

Summer’s last refuge, the green grass

pokes out from beneath the decomposition.

Soon, the grass blades will die like the leaves,

and winter’s glacial coat will cover

the hibernating ground.

The snow always reminds me of innocence,

while the half-alive leaves, shed from guilty trees,

is evidence of too much living.

Lips Lungs Tongue

I.

Lips, lungs, tongue.

Lips, lungs, tongue.

I’m smoking a cigarette outside the airport terminal,

when it raises its head, curls, then snakes

its way to my inner ear, settles there,

sounding soft and sanctimonious:

You make a living

from your lips,

your lungs,

and your tongue.

I hadn’t thought this thought this way before:

my lips

my lungs

my tongue.

Everything hinges on my body parts, moving,

working as involuntary gestures, or at least

the way I will them, and I’m smoking

a cigarette, outside the airport

in white, cold Michigan.

On the church steps in downtown Nashville, 2004

Listen to audio version

We put on a show.

Yelled, real loud, top-of-our-lungs rhyme

for the folks drinking five-dollar coffees

at the Starbucks across the street.

Minton suggested the church steps,

even though they didn’t say we could.

What they gonna do? Arrest us?

She shrugged one shoulder, wagged

her hand, then performed

a little ditty about war.

Undertow

Bottle slung against my parched lips,

deep-throated swallow, there’s a hollow

space behind my blood-shot vision.

I’m on my knees, worshipping

a toilet where my liquid guts

get flushed like yesterday

or last month. I can’t remember.

In the hallway, I stumble, fall hard

knock my teeth against floorboards.

My naked legs splayed, my naked arms splayed,

my belly wrenches and heaves spit.

The Earth Hums

The earth hums,

and scientists can’t explain it--

the high decibel keening,

a planet’s symphonic singing,

unheard by human ears but only

by delicate instruments, measuring

spherical noise.

Solipsistic Regrets for Jennifer

Me, 1990

Today's challenge from One Stop Poetry is to dust off an old poem that celebrates and begins to speak to our origins as poets. Here's my offering with a commentary that follows.


I.            

These days

I stomp on pain-staking ground

shifting beneath my feet

crumbling under my sole and you

stumble over my disturbances

and me:

Because

      heel ball toe

I dance alone in darkness

to the beat of remembered tongues

speaking lips words unspoken downcast eyes

for fear of seeing and unseeing

a child hurt and told

not to move because

He says so.

Because

   She sat and sits there still

a dark live thing bone in hand

pressed by a will too big to escape

the press the prod her body's surrender

to a hand feeling and unfeeling

the sun's beat against her back

her squint for turned heads

in fear of remembering hands and un-remembering

hands before they touch

un-being because

she must exist to hurt.

Unspoken Word

I.

As a child I spoke when spoken to,

learned my place as children often do

and stayed there,  

a still and silent thing, the picture

of assigned perfection, a portrait

of good-little-girl obedience, painted

by the refined strokes of the bible belt

across my back.

By adolescence, my mouth was a tight fist

where words were folded,

like my fingers to my palms,

an arsenal of unloaded weapons.

I sucked

the intentional hand, seeking to shut up my mouth

or extract words, like teeth.

I chewed my nails ragged,

swallowed the dead remains

and fed on silence to stave the threat of violence

and its dark premonitions.

Fear found fodder and took root

in the damp and toxic dump

of broken meanings, cast off words,

and useless verbs,

a heap

of what wasn’t said,

my funeral bed

of hot and smothered shame,

and every time I failed to claim

the air and muscle to speak my name,

I died another suicide.   

Death was a bad habit.

Cowgirls

What remains is mortared stone and the wood-framed window where I sat sighing at the colored prairie, longing for some glimpse of Elizabeth—her hat’s weathered brim telling hard times she rarely spoke of. The old Chestnut finally arrived. Only now do I dare wander that purple expanse, seeking some evidence of my poor love.

© Ami Mattison

Flash Fiction 55 for One Stop Poetry's Picture Prompt Challenge.

Photo courtesy of Sean McCormick

So Close

Listen to audio version:

I.

Last night you balanced a cigarette between two fingers. 

Smoke wafted from its burning tip, trembled, danced and disappeared

to thin air.  You had your elbow propped on the arm of your chair.

Your wrist was bent, fragile and posed as if it might break

against the slightest force. 

     An incongruent gesture. 

The sculptural permanence of your stilled and quieted hand

with the cigarette smoke, winding, and the rest of you,

falling to pieces.

Insomniac Night

Listen to audio version:

When the insomniac night finally ends,

I am here as I have always been, watching

light break the dark horizon, trying to keep time

with some rhyme and reason.

Should I let go and abandon this dreaming?

Or dare I walk towards the dawning of a new day

measured by the sway of my uncertain movement

towards a vague destination where I might find

some tangible sign for living

like the pulse

of a lover

waiting for me there.

Break the Glass

1.

I read old magazines and wait

thirty minutes for my name to be called

by a receptionist who tells me I’ll have to wait

another ten minutes for the doctor who finally appears

from behind the locked door.

The doctor scribbles on colored paper,

while I answer questions she asks:

What medications have you used in the past?

How long did the crisis last?

Have you ever attempted suicide?

Whether or not I tried to die

depends upon your definition.

Does refusing to bend

and taking it on the chin

amount to a death wish?

Does staying alive

when I should have died

count as a health risk?

The doctor prescribes Wellbutrin and Seroquel.

Poetry’s Lament

For Zardasht Osman

I.

Who has died?

Not from the sharp angles of my succinct metaphors

nor the poisonous shimmering of my images.

But from the brutal blade of silver

slicing through muscle.

A copper-nickel bullet plowing its path,

piercing the pulmonary.

A white-knuckled fist wrenching

fragile flesh.

Violence is not metaphorical or lyrical.

There is no song to it,

no rhyme nor clever meter.

Only the low guttural groan of sudden

grief, then howling a keening loss.

Violence speaks its own language

babbling nonsense to the living.

Dispossession

I do not claim here to be either story-teller or scribe.  On the territory of dispossession, I would that I could sing.

Assia Djebar, An Algerian Calvalcade.

The hothouse orchid hangs its sickly head,

a floating, scent-less garden.

Beneath it, upon newsprint, a ladybug lies dead,

the colorful carapace, hardened and dusty.

The rusty tool in my hand will not repair

the flower or insect’s despair,

while the headline says nothing

of the mother’s howl,
                                 her grief,

for the slain child’s bowels, 
                                         strewn across the street.

Night at the Blue Granary

Flash Fiction 55 version (revised):

Stars light the Iowa canopy with possibility. The granary is blue sadness, but the thriving wildflowers bloom pink. Where else do farm wives go to be alone, except to forgotten and fallen-down places? Kisses, wet and furtive, we ache. Still, we return home to husbands. 

Original version (revised):

Hundreds of stars light up the Iowa canopy with possibility. Surrounded by fallow fields, the dilapidated granary is dark-blue sadness, but the wildflowers, thriving in the late summer heat, bloom in pinks and gold.

Girl’s night out was rowdy at the bar. The two of us danced with local men, who could have been our cousins or our cousins’ cousins, and some were, but no one cares.  Not when the beer is cheap and the men are buying and the band’s playing Cash and King.

We laughed all the way to the parking lot, but as I turned the car to head towards your house, you opened the window and said quietly, “I don’t want to go home.”

The Flight Surgeon

Deployed to Afghanistan from the States, she's the only doctor for a U.S. military squadron of two hundred.

When she's not cursing the clinic hours that her squadron ignores—they drop-in at their whim for Ibuprofen and Ambien—she walks to the Egyptian hospital to scrub-in, pouring bottled water over her disinfected hands for surgery.

A boy has lost his foot to a land mine. They must amputate to just below the knee.

The Egyptian surgeon laughs good-naturedly at the way she stands by his side during surgery. She is determined to help, to get her hands bloody.

He says the word “cut” in Arabic, which she understands. She hands him a scalpel. Good, he says. Very good.

Are you more American or Korean? He asks.

Who do they distrust the most? She wonders.

Portrait: Woman

I.

Water drips in the kitchen.

She slow-sips ice tea and inhales

deep on the butt-end of a cigarette.

Two fingertips pressed to her lips,

she sucks on slow suicide, counts

her days, square patterns on wall paper

curling and unglued at the edges.

The laundry’s undone, dishes in the sink,

the stinking trash holds scraps,

leftover from last week.

She seeks redemption from the summer heat

sticking to her skin, the sweat of dreams

melting ice cubes in her half-empty glass.

Ties That Bind

i.

two women talk and tie colored strings    knotting     unknotting the ends

bowline loop     short-end sheet bend     for unexpected complications

how to connect     one thin piece    to another secure     yet easy to undo knot?

like skilled fingers     knitting learned movements     answers

are known yet unspoken things     which is why

winding conversation is familar to me

they speak of binds     of family and mixed blood thick    

violent as ocean     continental divide     ancestral drift

and the silence

                                    one woman says

I'm tired of living all the hard stories

her past lies as slithering pieces     cut

and fallen     or hanging still from her wrists

she quits the task making frayed parts fit

hard scratch

i.

it begins under your skin

where muscle meets bone

where the elbow attaches to the fist

bone where the fist bone attaches

to the jaw bone it begins under

your skin this itch like a chigger bite

begins so small but burns as you claw-cut

it open you prefer the seeping

wound to the craving that settles

deep and seeps from your veins

infiltrates your brain and burns

your skin your darkness