A Website of the Radical Imagination
Alison Stone Ghouls in the bushes, bones on lawns.
Leaves reach the height of their fire
and the veil between the worlds thins
toward the only day that I am
once again my mother’s child.
Some people avoid this doom-focused revelry –
children’s faces bloody and scarred,
plastic fangs crammed in their small mouths,
spider webs and gravestones in suburban yards.
But it’s the living who can hurt us.
I’m hollow-eyed from too much news,
my family fractured,
democracy unravelling.
What is the sound of desire –
heart reaching toward nursing school,
time with her six-year-old son?
Pieces of the unchosen future
rot inside her,
turn septic.
The house smelled of cats, mildew, loneliness.
Through empty rooms, the wind blew loneliness.
What a woman knows, she tells slant.
Let men and the sun spill everything.
The moon, too, keeps secrets.
Birds broadcast their news all day.
I Love You, Stormy Daniels
(a tanka)
Sweet the cuffs will close
due to a porn star he said
looks like his daughter.
Cops got Capone for taxes,
too. Who’s grabbed by the crotch now?
[Originally posted on April 1, 2023.]
Hey, ho, make a merry din!
Weaving over, under, laughing at mess-ups,
we circled, flowers in our hair,
ribbons chosen to match our desires.
How fragile — heart, brain, womb, sinew, and bone.
How easily bodies, and dreams, can die.
A woman’s safest when she is alone.
Spooning, our dog and cat doze in the sun.
Tails twitch and amber eyes close in the sun.
Hope sparked by a bright field. Sorrow, the woods.
We caution children, Don’t go in the woods.
He chose friends for wit, his bride for beauty.
She always erred on the side of beauty.
Punk soul in a Father’s body, Hopkins
wrote the motley an anthem –- Pied Beauty.
Mary Oliver’s speaker walks with awe
through the world. Dickinson’s died for beauty.
“From the inside.” “Eye of the beholder.”
Well-meaning parents lied about beauty.
When the Jew-hate starts, rely
on no one. Not neighbors who shared your table,
groups you fought for, friends you stayed up late
consoling. You’re alone. Bear
this because you must. Later
you can cry, now reinforce your door, rate
hiding places – cellar, attic, underneath a hay bale
or mask. Try ignorance, denial, catatonia. Bleat
prayers in a made-up tongue when they beat
the ones they’ve caught. Relay
this to others – Bonds you’ve trusted aren’t real.
Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.
The lives we didn’t choose meet us in dreams –
teacher, pilot, maker of origami doves.
Landscapes morph or disappear
to house wishes our day-lives hide.
To be reborn, break the caul of the past.
Take off the moth-eaten shawl of the past.
This moment’s open doors and empty rooms.
Portraits, mirrors line the hall of the past.
Cow blood on the sheet can save a bride’s life.
Danger of scripture, alcohol, the past.
Stare at flowers.
Not the snap-necked daffodils or the hyacinth your husband flattened with the car.
Take in the unblemished blossoms left.
Remind yourself that future thoughts
and prayers probably won’t be for your town
and if your town, not your kid’s school.
And if they are, statistically your child
would be scared but safe, hiding in a closet
under mops or climbing from a window, running
dazed toward the expressway to flag help.