Shelly Taylor
[11]
It’s napalm, rigor mortis. You chop the onion to live. Salud es vida:
a little flame for a second filmed black & white / spend a little
time with me away from doctrination / radiation meters for children / I’m
always thinking about that / the hills yellow-rubbed as dawn we can’t see the
other side of or beyond with the force of a cattle prod leading to crime. Somebody should’ve told me this when I
was fourteen / dare I run through the thicket barely visible in the growing
dark looking for the cat, Thomas Jefferson inconsolable, this solid thinking
between a gun & a bird at the top of my fear list. I am not here for her / I am unforgiving
the hardness of your body, what awaited resistance / body, the simplest thing
toting about makes limp.
What will I wear?
I could have told you long ago this would happen / these nights remind
you of your youth, barefooted to the barn for Hontas & the old mare, rake
the aisle I’ve never found anywhere so noiseless, country on the dusty radio
propped up on a cinder block. Such
harshness grows within you I presume / it leads to foodstands in Europe &
every little hooker in a Red Light District, you cry bad mama / cannot hold for
dear life, manhood, with eyes half-shut.
What I did my invictus self is let him take up too much / & all the
men too ready to say doll baby, slip room numbers under a highball /
—& now the ice cream truck starts its belling down the avenue just
given up on childhood / up on the rooftop, click, click, click, fingers grown
worn a little weary playing on our faces—a flare for dramatics in some
French novel where girls are ter-rib-le / so much for sex. He carves out his address on the bar
top with a knife, premature aggity / after all that bends outwards; women
forget themselves til they are nothing, perfect faces leonine / a tad bit husky
as in she has known a wolfhound, the wall punched out for watching, watch
yourself. In the still of
remonstrance, we forget our face lines / a girlhood that rages still past
senior citizenship: cheap date brasse, strut musketeering / her girl
parts. Give me all you have
between me cleaning the house & doing my God all the things errant to get
my feet a splendid come see: you
best stay on course. Novena / my
body, my home mourning, caught in a night blooming seedfruit / quiet as his
legs rushed his horse’s back lurching moonward the shedrow, wholed over for one
more desert year violent in the front yard, every tapestry skirt / fodder on
every redbrick porch the noon, their faces. Why women wait so, dozens of us in front our doors, handfuls
of milagros for their lapels.
[4]
In this modernity of warfare a man needn’t necessarily
button his
helmet strap below his chin. In
when the music starts
the town is invaded. This is old glory, our boys giving the
opposition hell.
His mama worries, his pops worries back home. When back home,
the town sits down on his
chest making breathing trifling.
One man
on a rooftop feigning
nothing in I will jump. Bus lines
run
like regular. This is well-deserved PTSD pension
Uncle. Being pretty
he becomes the most
happening thing about this town.
From all the bottles & shots, his belly swells. I know nothing,
name everything, tap the
bookshelf, each book lives—
has there never been a time
we’ve not grieved? You driving up
the mountain
from this valley of desert
could happen. Every truck on the
street is
a white Ram, at every
stoplight the truck hauling who knows,
each sticker on the truck
says Terror War Veteran, thus every station rips
the metal. Look it’s Dio doing Holy Diver. In dreams you
throw your body from the
mountainside, hurling back to the desert
ground so
you don’t have to think. Video
games plot
extinction of
opposing forces but that shit’s gaming, no biggie.
Rest your elbows on the bartop you are safe from here on
out. I cannot
think when the phone is
silent, I name yard things new ones—perlocution
because I
say so. If he should fall I would
upend him a lion;
that’s what
he would want me to do.
[20]
Little boy blue I will not tend you
when your mother never
did. There are no
endings,
just a straightline
whale rider, no shore, not
even a trigger will find his feet
the sand, body uncurled
into that of a man’s or
some far off myth to stop
the sea line from ascending. I
hope
that it is as blue as it has
been in my dreams.
Warfare in the morning, he flails
side-to-side in this sweat
summer, virtuoso sweat
that makes God so handy;
tender of light, wrath, better you
follow the
tradewinds, yourself & mercy.
Relief
to know you are still of
the living—
some channel wind that drug
you far off from your task of get your ass
back on the land. Rush onward heavy-shouldered pioneers
the frogs’ endless ducking
sound mating from under
every banyan & banana
ripened subtropic showdown. I
think
of you, the neck that
quickheld me under, cut the cord
unto the water; there are
various ways of forgetting:
strap the babies in the car
& go. Mothers need not
feckless sons
or heat lightning, we
never could grow older now. Come
in there are three storms
at once, the bridegroom
filled up from such waiting,
freckles the
tip of my nose, the newness.
Put on that body so often lain down,
every news caption reads
another one of our men of blue has gone to Jesus.
Incandescent, every sharpshooter on the street corner is a
mother. Each
derrick has
led you homeward righteously perfumed as in a strawberry’s sweetness.
Psalm 3: deep covers
man under.
Deliver his body grown under the grooves of a whale’s belly,
my marine’s
best rifle, the pool which I
tread my own legs so forceful from making home.