Read Online Two Bowls of Milk by Stephanie Bolster - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stephanie Bolster
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you will lean
away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow.
Beach Sweet Pea
Tenacious as cat’s claws
you cling to the salt
grit, mark your place
in roots and the innermost
pink of anemone’s
tentacles. Beside that dropped
starfish with its guts to the sky,
that branch bleached
and sea-worn,
you are the one
who holds brine between your toes,
tide in your teeth.
Oriental Poppy
The truth is in the red of you,
the black centre wide
as a pupil in a blind-drawn room.
Bloodshot, you stare
into the sky and will not squint
until the sun does.
RED STILETTO
“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
– Charles Simic, “Our Angelic Ancestor”
Something here –
Nike runner with its arc
of dreamed flight, feathered
bedroom slipper, red
stiletto with the pointed toe,
arrows into darkness.
The bodies have hopped between
dumpsters, between these bookshelves.
Hissing cats, torn pages, milk
cartons licked blank.
They have unwritten
their other legs. They believe in silence
and the striving after balance.
Somewhere in there
they stand like resting flamingoes,
tuck around them
the memory of the other leg
like a cruel friendship
lost in childhood. Phantom phrases still
caught in their knotted tongues.
ASSONANCE
Hurt bird in dirt
– she writes
for sound, and a sparrow
that hit the window of her childhood
too hard. Because of how the ear
takes words in and holds them
to itself, how they strike
those bones:
hammer, anvil
and
stirrup
. Words that conjure
machinery, weight,
horses, that morning her leg
caught and the mare dragged her
for miles. From the first,
each word she’d learned
a hoof just missing her
temple. It is all pain,
the reddish shell the side
of the head cups, and hears
itself, hears itself.
LOST THINGS POKE THROUGH MELTING SNOW
Stunted remnants of plants, months-old dogshit, a single red mitten that belonged to a girl who’d been punished for the loss, one hand made to go bare the rest of that winter. When her mother, tending tulip shoots, found the mitten, she pinned it to the girl’s chest, broke the skin so she would not forget. The next winter they found the girl’s heart, grey and hard as stone, in the centre of a thrown snowball. It nearly blinded the boy. In the kitchen they set the heart beside the turkey wishbone, meatless and saved for later. Microwaved on low, stroked with new white towels, it thawed into the pumping of nothing through itself. In the hospital they returned it wrapped in sheets and anaesthesia, stitched deep, a gift she could not return. The next year she went walking in her red rubber boots until only a trail of hollow exclamation marks was left.
THIS IS THE WEEK OF DEAD THINGS
By the lake I find a mole unearthed, mouth raw as supermarket steak. Its body is a cylinder furred with the passive half of Velcro. Its feet curled pink as a bird’s.
A friend says he has killed two mice in as many days. He wakes to the snap and finds one caught behind the eyes, dancing its last dance. Afterwards it’s hardly a heft in his palm, less than a skipping stone.
I find the fish plucked eyeless and scaleless where the tide has left. It might have been perch or flounder, might have been angelfish. Wind stirs no inch of it. Sand sifts around it. This is the longest its fins have been anywhere.
When I visit my friend, a car hits a crow, and the street’s a sudden gathering of crows. For half an hour outside his window black eyes watch the curb and that black unflapping thing. Then they’re gone. I leave behind my half-drained teacup.
This evening each thing dies before me. A bundle of muddy newsprint is a chewed raccoon’s tail and those distant blown shreds of tire by the roadside, what’s left of a bear.
How could I not turn away from the precious bald head of that man waiting in the bus shelter?
EDGE OF THE RIVER
Tamarack, shamrock,
black water with a stone in its throat. Black willow:
Very
away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow.
Beach Sweet Pea
Tenacious as cat’s claws
you cling to the salt
grit, mark your place
in roots and the innermost
pink of anemone’s
tentacles. Beside that dropped
starfish with its guts to the sky,
that branch bleached
and sea-worn,
you are the one
who holds brine between your toes,
tide in your teeth.
Oriental Poppy
The truth is in the red of you,
the black centre wide
as a pupil in a blind-drawn room.
Bloodshot, you stare
into the sky and will not squint
until the sun does.
RED STILETTO
“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”
– Charles Simic, “Our Angelic Ancestor”
Something here –
Nike runner with its arc
of dreamed flight, feathered
bedroom slipper, red
stiletto with the pointed toe,
arrows into darkness.
The bodies have hopped between
dumpsters, between these bookshelves.
Hissing cats, torn pages, milk
cartons licked blank.
They have unwritten
their other legs. They believe in silence
and the striving after balance.
Somewhere in there
they stand like resting flamingoes,
tuck around them
the memory of the other leg
like a cruel friendship
lost in childhood. Phantom phrases still
caught in their knotted tongues.
ASSONANCE
Hurt bird in dirt
– she writes
for sound, and a sparrow
that hit the window of her childhood
too hard. Because of how the ear
takes words in and holds them
to itself, how they strike
those bones:
hammer, anvil
and
stirrup
. Words that conjure
machinery, weight,
horses, that morning her leg
caught and the mare dragged her
for miles. From the first,
each word she’d learned
a hoof just missing her
temple. It is all pain,
the reddish shell the side
of the head cups, and hears
itself, hears itself.
LOST THINGS POKE THROUGH MELTING SNOW
Stunted remnants of plants, months-old dogshit, a single red mitten that belonged to a girl who’d been punished for the loss, one hand made to go bare the rest of that winter. When her mother, tending tulip shoots, found the mitten, she pinned it to the girl’s chest, broke the skin so she would not forget. The next winter they found the girl’s heart, grey and hard as stone, in the centre of a thrown snowball. It nearly blinded the boy. In the kitchen they set the heart beside the turkey wishbone, meatless and saved for later. Microwaved on low, stroked with new white towels, it thawed into the pumping of nothing through itself. In the hospital they returned it wrapped in sheets and anaesthesia, stitched deep, a gift she could not return. The next year she went walking in her red rubber boots until only a trail of hollow exclamation marks was left.
THIS IS THE WEEK OF DEAD THINGS
By the lake I find a mole unearthed, mouth raw as supermarket steak. Its body is a cylinder furred with the passive half of Velcro. Its feet curled pink as a bird’s.
A friend says he has killed two mice in as many days. He wakes to the snap and finds one caught behind the eyes, dancing its last dance. Afterwards it’s hardly a heft in his palm, less than a skipping stone.
I find the fish plucked eyeless and scaleless where the tide has left. It might have been perch or flounder, might have been angelfish. Wind stirs no inch of it. Sand sifts around it. This is the longest its fins have been anywhere.
When I visit my friend, a car hits a crow, and the street’s a sudden gathering of crows. For half an hour outside his window black eyes watch the curb and that black unflapping thing. Then they’re gone. I leave behind my half-drained teacup.
This evening each thing dies before me. A bundle of muddy newsprint is a chewed raccoon’s tail and those distant blown shreds of tire by the roadside, what’s left of a bear.
How could I not turn away from the precious bald head of that man waiting in the bus shelter?
EDGE OF THE RIVER
Tamarack, shamrock,
black water with a stone in its throat. Black willow:
Very
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