Three Poems
Crash
First, there is only a sense of wonder.
Simple answers tossed up like dice;
who, what, and how lying somewhere
in the sparkling flotsam of the senses.
Their fragments mix with the metal and glass.
Vision rises like a radiant blister.
The glamorous flash of exploding flowers,
gold, pink, and blue, a celebrity’s welcome.
Sound will have to be added later, edited
into the flickering reel, ambient noise
nothing but the sweet shush of static.
Pain arrives slowly, shuffling, hungry,
the drag of its feet stirring the broken dark.
Tongue tests its limits – the world boiled down
to rust and salt, the thick elements
of our hearts. Here we are.
Passing seconds assemble the pieces.
The players gather, the spotlights
pour out their flares in blinding aurora.
And then, suddenly, there is only a windshield
and a star extending anemone hands
to the ends of the glass, the ends of the world.
Ashes
Peanut shells, ash,
zinnias and geraniums.
Fifty cent beers
deepening stains on the table
when the call came,
and it was for you.
We looked politely away
while you shook your head,
put one hand in your hair;
watched four drunk men
with a dog
clack the balls on the pool table.
They called to tell you
our school friend was dead
in the plane crash
splashed on every front page,
stamped even then
on the red ribbon
that slid across the bar’s TV screen.
Ash clung to the veins
of spilled beer.
The dog ran through the open door
to the street
with the grind of breaks,
the shriek of rubber on pavement.
The men went out,
brought the dog back in.
It was limping.
While they talked
and finished their beers,
it licked the bald spots
torn in its leg, the slick pink
exposed within soft mist of red.
We sat, watching,
with nothing to say.
Ash stuck to the sweat of our hands.
Over us, the zinnias and geraniums
dipped in the wind
like stained, living glass.
Fade Out
"Your dead will cease to love you."
--Chief Seattle, on the leaving of family burial grounds
In time
this too will turn as stale
as wedding cake taped in a paper box,
carved marble dropping its sugary crumbs
and hinges rusting, grinding
loosened wires.
Like the souvenirs
we nudge up with our footsteps,
the gritty snubs of dead batteries,
sanded glass; all the uselessness
of relics.
What we need
when we paw the bottom of drawers,
shake the last coins from a battered wallet
is beneath us; not in the scraps and shards
we wrap so carefully in our luggage,
in the notes we crumple into pockets;
not even in the change of clothes we unfold
long after the change in the weather, having ignored
the signs in the clouds, the soil-tremble
of the thunder,
the voices
that still whisper through our hair.
Jacqueline West's work has been published in journals including Flashquake, The Pedestal Magazine, Inkwell Journal, Barnwood, St. Ann's Review, and Briar Cliff Review. Her chapbook, Cherma, is forthcoming from Parallel Press. More about her work can be found at http://www.jacquelinewest.net/.