I wrote a thing recently that was simultaneously praised and rejected. I'm making a few changes and sending it to some more presses. If it isn't accepted before Halloween, I will publish it then.
Halloween is a special day for me-it's the day I lost my mom to cancer.
While some in my family choose to dread its approach, I remember it as the only thing capable of taking her. I think of the peace it gave her. I envision Death of the Endless taking her away to slumber undisturbed.
There is power on October 31st, if only because I will there to be power.
To celebrate this ambitious new project, I thought I'd post one of the poems-it functions as a chapter of sorts, and is part of a greater narrative structure.
Read. Enjoy. Await the larger work. It comes from somewhere deep within me.
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When the Trees were Felled
She sent her voice down
To the very roots of her
Resonant and deep as God
On that December morning
And as bits of bark littered where she stood
She never knew who her words reached
Perhaps they, like her,
Were simply reduced
Until no trace was left
In the atmosphere
…For there was no answer.
One thing was clear as the blade sank deep
Drank the sap that seeped from some nameless wound:
Their life was her death.
The men showed no restraint as she bled
She weakened beneath their hands
And as the brain fog set in
She longed only to sleep -
An impossible feat in the din of their machines.
The neuropathy snaked through her veins like lightning
Violent and silent
To those who don’t know how to see
Once, she thought she heard a response
But it was only an echo
Empty and broken
Just a sullen token of moments before
When chaos felled order
Where from her core she’d spoken
Five words into the deep.
Defenses Up. Give no Quarter.
Emptiness
When at last she slept
She was a wooden plank
What remained of her body had been made smooth and flat
Her sisters were arranged around her
Together, they created a kind of structure
An emptiness in which others might live
For that is all space is-
Emptiness.
A void to fill
With the insubstantialness
Of our lives.
She could not see
Living specimens of her kind
But she knew they were there,
Those sentinels that still thrived in this strange new land.
Their branches towered over
The place where she lay condemned
To a life of support
Bearing the weight so that
Others might have peace.
No, she could not see the girl
Who crafted her stories
Beneath the canopy of the willow
Who wept constantly
The Willow, I mean
But the girl cried too
They both wept constantly.
She could not see them from where she lay
But they were there just the same
The girl and the tree that kept her company.
The tree is long dead
The girl too for that matter
And neither of them is resting easily