Rachaelikins@gmail.com
Eclipse
In the dark of their minds, Moon is a woman
with her hair on fire
as she runs across sky to escape a bear,
impales herself on the a
bull’s curved horns.
Twins kneel mute while
a hunter offers her a dead lynx.
Who wants
to wear fur
when their hair’s on fire? The sun will blast soon
an orange Cadillac
sliding nose first into the pond. ice crackles,
pops ears of frogs
plugged into the muck.
Burning hair ignites sleeping infants,
wind’s voice roughened
by their nakedness.
Liquid dreams spill into the earth.
This is a sex
dream, I knew it.
From each droplet sprouts a clock.
Ticks and fleas
fly off their faces.
Spruce needles pierce the dog’s chest. Sigh past
tiers of soil while I drape myself unclothed
in the hammock.
Silvered, licking flames.
My ears prick-distant pops:
deer gutted to heaven. When the moon eclipses,
I cut out black and white paper
dolls to plant in a row. I lower my lip to frost,
sip silence punctuated
by a bass soloist dangling upside down in the spruce tree.
The octopus with a taste for peaches tiptoes across grass
to help herself.
Nasturtium tongues shrivel on granite,
rabbit excises radicchio
to rosette’s bitterness.
When Nicole trips the switch, stars stop shooting.
After one house burns down,
the pool falls into the ocean.
My finger-skin opens a thousand mouths
to bite your hair,
the weight of your heat bricked against my bones,
flowers for
soldiers playing in corners with their wings,
the foundation of
all that is necessary.
Exhibition: Pictures from a Zoom Screen
1
I will be the branch that taps the upstairs window long after I’m gone. Ice weights spruce needles with thoughts of violence.
2
Pain becomes the day no matter how my feet hit the floor. Branches clackety clack, Mardi Gras noisemakers and foot to foot crust crackles beneath boots.
Pain becomes the constant hoodie, its arm around your shoulders.
3
I grab spruce combs and shake as if we have just met. Try to crack the ice coating the snow coating the ice, gravity demands as the wind buffets snowflakes flying drunk as insects hatched too early in the plummeting.
4
A year ago we watched this same repeat: Georgia Aquarium, world’s largest, where an otter learned to submit herself for twice weekly fluids for kidney failure. You sat on my lap. We had no idea the how fast sand was speeding down our funnel.
5
I don’t want to write on command,
hang my words out, ragged lingerie
for drive-by opinions.
6
Those lobsters with their rubber-banded claws watch me watching them starve. Cold stabs blue knives. Pistol shots pop, tree sap spills over crust. I feel dread. Those silent minutes falling falling
7
Am I the whale and they, Jonah? I can’t stop thinking about lobsters. Do lobsters have souls? Remember that snowy day we went out and you tired and I scooped you in my arms nattering about ice, cold and salt?
8
Souls that clamber over live rock and crevice, sifting detritus with restless feelers. Tree souls strain against this late weight. Subliminal awareness, death unpacking boxes to stay.
9
When the power goes out we are just voles tunneling snow. His eyes drift shut narcotized, words pattered through cyberspace soothe his aches. A dog listens tucked out of sight inside his sweatshirt, tail keeps time with his heartbeat where nobody sees.
10
That poet’s words fall dry as shredded cardboard and gray, a dust cloud that flakes onto the floorboards. There are splinters.