“How often I have lain beneath the rain on a strange roof thinking of home” --As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
There is a certain stillness when everything around you drowns and drips like mourning Mona Lisa
Makeshift soak for lack of wholeness fill deep the parched cracks of skin
that pine away like loosened paint through twisting fingers
Suffocate sound with numb and drone until nothingness is so pure, I can hear it exhale
White noise of melted street sleek passing cars, a lullaby in those nights when my own voice won’t sound
I climb limb of tree and slick of roof to see and maybe bleed
vintage joellyn published in Collision magazine “It was my aunt’s purse, the one who overdosed on heroin,” I tell them when they ask where I got it
faux hard leather real vintage, they say I bask in its underlying meaning: true hippie.
square-round bodice open half-moon flap there is a flower focus on it crop out everything else except for what is lonely there and what is lovely
etched into skin decorative weeds tumble relentless and overgrown with an endless stem and no beginning; she liked them best this way
grind petals into powder and sniff; hippie-slide into haze and forget until, instead, inject into pinched vein and forgotten.
red hair (a series)
I.
There was a war in my mother’s house. Drew, my mother’s brother of red hair, his fist drawn back to punch pain-- only pain’s face resembled my mother’s.
Pain in the form of red-hair Joellyn. Baby sister of green-eye tie-dyed swirls of heroin haze, betrayal in an overdose.
Splinter pain and memory like cracked orange ceramics. Only once it’s cracked, there’s an urge to crush: obliterate the thing. Like it will never hurt you once the pieces are collected into an urn.
My mother wants to burn the stacks of newspapers piled in the corner; my grandmother’s attempt to preserve lost time lost children.
II.
I remember his house, next to my grandmother’s. Dim light or none with burnt-orange couches and cigarette butts budding a sickening stench that burns into cushions.
It reminds me of the stories where the man snatches the girl and there is no ending because she is stuck with him indefinitely, and no one saves her.
(Maybe I made that up. Maybe they are not fables at all.)
I choke on unwashed air and ash. Stem of smoke grows out of my uncle’s mouth; but there is no bud, or hope of one. Smoke wheezes by branches Of barren bronchial trees.
Nothing grows here. At least, nothing sustains.
III.
I dream of red hair: a red hair rope wraps around my ankle like vine and pulls me from my grandmother’s house to his.
I dig my heels into Louisiana dirt, severing grass roots. Resist. You are not them.
I want to burn the rope. Let it gnarl and smolder into ash.
But a rope burns to both ends.
So I continue being dragged.
IV.
Drew’s life of abuse spanned people and vice. Alcohol sought revenge, Was avenged: liver failure.
On his dying bed, dressed in mourning, regretful eyes and graying red hair, Drew summons a priest.
He admits he cheated, stole, and bullied.
He begs forgiveness. But from whom?
He wants to be saved. From whom?
My mother is ashamed to believe it is we who are saved.
V.
After all of the years of burning, he will dissolve into his real parts: ashes of wretched flesh and red hair.
My mother’s mother asks her if she wants some of the ash. “He was good to me…” my grandmother reasons, (without reason).
But how does a daughter forgive a mother who pities her abuser? How does a daughter love a mother who is blinded by her own delusion? Blinded by red hair.