An upwards slanted walk
This is my story house, the remains of a Cinderella story,
where the Lincoln Plaza jazz kicked up and out the window
and I woke bleeding in the blackout autumn sprinklers.
So, I’m a little defensive in the oven.
I’ve simmered tender long enough.
I’ve earned the right to edit the light wind angles of prose
into my first edition’s slippery legs.
She became my pharmakon fairy,
my suspended lace.
The White Knights died that night
for all the rights…
…and I should have left.
But our child was blanket smothered for
an unsolicited six months,
so I released in dynamite and
prayed in this pre-oven basket
of roasted lamb, calamari,
and many empty, empty greys.
This poem originally appeared in The Grave of the Great Alley of Clarity Cats, an anthology of poetry written by Mike Giardina. The complete the anthology is available below:
Table of contents:
- Sun Shine Body
- On arrival in a lot of no civilization and plenty of letters,
- The unable to deliver
- An upwards slanted walk
- A familiar voice
- Those who have a standard way of going
- Left each chapter within us
- Warm smile not found in her cigarette
- To regain his composure for figures
- Food for rejecting his feet
- Even during--even if it during
- Lying on the floor, stretched after stir
- A soldier frames the wall
- A step by boulder
- A train by life station
- I was able to take the old north of town
- Fledgling
- Job
- Bradbury's closet
- A mummy's leggings
- Sipping mother's sweat
- Flash like an individual there
- I realize the skyline while playing catch with mother's death
- Running far away from a city, to return a week later
- Dysmorphexia
- Carried the clock over
- We have been meeting years
- Chocolate Italian princess
- Champion of Years
- "How much longer will I be able to remount the mothproof thrusting..."
- Over as rivers are over