October 2024
Author's Note: I am proud to continue my forays into collage with two art pieces on display this month, one at the New Mexico Art League and the other at Tortuga Gallery, and I am now in my fourth printmaking course—like poetry, so much still to learn. But I continue to work on writing as well, and am pleased that two of my recent cheribun, a prose form that incorporates cherita, made the finalists in MacQueen's Quinterly's Cheribun Contest.
Kitchen Drawer Props for a Horror Film
Knives, always knives, a knife block
or a magnetic bar, always within grasp
of the hapless and the killers, but blades
are for those with desperate imaginations.
Ah, the endless inspiration for directors:
kitchen drawers ripe with possibilities.
The rolling pin of solid wood or marble,
hefty enough for contusions, concussions,
head trauma, or its cousin the meat mallet,
a hammer with the added thrills of points.
The simple corkscrew: its twists and turns
could turn an eye to jelly in no time.
The cheese grater, the gradual scraping
of skin, layer by layer, down to cartilage,
or its cousin, the potato peeler, a swifter
approach that achieves the same results.
And if the setting is a remote old farmhouse,
the rotary hand beater could be cranked up,
which could bruise and tatter a tongue,
or crush and mangle some fingers.
But no, it’s always the quick dip of a knife
into the gut, the bloody cloud of its puncture.
Haunted
The washing machine
wails like a child
whose mother’s been murdered.
The laundry room rattles
as if possessed by a ghost,
a clattering racket to wake the dead.
Mangled towels are wrenched
into a lifeless muddle,
twisted in knots
round a set of spectral sheets.
An odd sock is strangled
around the agitator.
Eager to exit the basement,
I uncoil laundered linens
like a mummy’s shrouds,
shift them to the dryer.
As I start a second load
a cold-fingered chill
spooks the hair on my neck:
a red stain bleeds
in the bottom of the drum.
Ghost Stories
A house full of girls and few closets,
the last of his scent whisked off to Goodwill,
every suit, sweater, shirt and shoe—
even a lone sock missing its match: gone.
She cries to her ghost, go on—
the books, the music . . . so much left to sort.
She keeps forgetting to make only half a pot of coffee,
curses as she pours his half down the sink.
Last week she forgot to grease a pan of gingerbread men,
scraped them with a spatula into a pile of body parts,
which the girls thought were da bomb.
They chatter about school and boys and videos
as if his chair at the table had always been empty.
Yesterday she caught herself tracing his name
through an accumulation of dust on the dresser,
five simple letters, over and over,
like a witch invoking a spell to bring him back.
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