ISSUE FIFTEEN

fafter brewing a cup of French roast

I step outside

songbirds echo from the magnolia tree

a shifting breeze moves around me

placing my laptop on the garden table

I sink into the sun soaked chair

rest my fingers on the plastic keys

waiting for that automatic moment

when a sharp pain rips through my stomach

I double over

notice my poem sitting next to me

she scoffs at my travel plans

my niceties about the garden

insists I’m lazy

writing through a facade

never close

with no apologies I massage that elusive spot

her chaos of words

as she moves closer

slams my fingers over the keys

slightly bruised I surrender to her fury

accept my fate

as the sharp pain in my stomach

slowly subsides

Imagine a line like a rolled petal, darker than blood, brown at the edges.

If you have an orderly mind, it might seem like a dignified end, rather

than dropping unceremoniously (but who is to say what a ceremony

can be?) from a vase. The president keeps his roses close to his chest,

their fragrance trapped in their tight structure, yet a little is released

each time he opens the tin. Is there a more delightful invention than

a clock? We pry apart and leap through the hours using its two

wiper-like hands: hands that really do feel the pressure of time.

Imagine this stanza as upside down. There is no need, then, for it to

be written upside down. Readers are ready, for what is not complete

novelty: it is only novelty within this poem and book. The heel

and snout are reversed. The root supplants the bloom. To use

a human or sunflower – rather than a pig – figure. How flexible are we?

Can we invert our days in order to find more metaphorical truffles?

Hedonists are adept at this. Tyrants have others turned upside down

for the keys to safes in their pockets. Or for a key to a room full of art.

Long lines suggest death, when piled upon each other. How deep, you

ask, can we bury them? Deep enough to find water? There is no use for

rhetorical questions underground. Stand guard on yourself, watch

a myth trickle into the next century. Yesterday I saw Death cross

the road holding a picture of the Madonna over their face. Curious.

Yet it is not death I want to conclude with, but with the unrectangular

face of Jacinda Arden, who made of terrorists nonentities. The shape

of New Zealand (or of any landmass), is an awkward one to bury.

The Girls on the Bridge – midsummer 1901

From my rotting body

flowers shall grow

and I am in them

and that is eternity.

Edvard Munch

The midnight sun is nudging the horizon.

Three young women stand together,

gazing down into the water’s

wavering reflection of that moon-like orb,

the Nordic sun, and also a dark, brooding

mass, inchoate on the farther shore.

All is still: no sound of birds,

no breeze disturb the gravitas.

The girls have paused in the hiatus

spanning disparate centuries—

the one in red flanked by her friends

or sisters, wearing white and green,

evoking vernal aureoles

of new-leafed apple trees.

Yesterday is virginal in white:

baptism and first Communion; bride.

Today is the embodiment of passionate

desire for life, arrayed in red— a poppy,

an anemone; the heart, the blood,

the troth of lovers, marriage bed,

the birthing of a child;

the crimson haemorrhage from ailing lungs—

first the mother who succumbed;

then the sister who died young,

her silent, stricken siblings at her side.

Tomorrow, yet to be inscribed,

is like midsummer’s evening skies—

celestial cerulean, forget-me-not.

All three girls upon the bridge

gaze down upon the water’s face

as if to scry what might await them

on the other side: beyond ensorcelled

summer night, this eerie twilit sky—

After the painting, “The Girls on the Bridge” (1901) – by Edvard Munch

https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collection/object/NG.M.00844

See also other paintings of three girls on the bridge, which vary the 

configuration and feature a blue dress instead of a green one.