Jenn Mattern AKA Breed ‘Em and Weep, no longer breeding, only sometimes weeping, still blogging.
You don't come around,
she says
over her basket of clean laundry
below the horizon of clothesline
and rose gold. She doesn't know
what tone to take anymore so
her fingers do the talking now,
sifting through her apron pocket
of wooden clothespin soldiers.
Oh, Jarle, my Norwegian earworm!
When you ask her
where her shoes are,
she tells you finally,
haltingly
that she's outgrown
them all.
Turns out she's been wearing her
battered, torn snowboots to class
for two months, maybe three.
She's been wearing them
all the time, whatever the weather.
"Are you crying?" asks my songbird.
She leans in my bedroom doorway wrapped in a bath towel. Damp and pale and shining, she has just emerged from what she would call an "epical" (epic + magical) shower, where she's been singing for 45 minutes.
More fun, please, with a side
of ombré and razoring.
Tell no one of my dark past,
my ashy roots, mined silver.
It's my hair and I can curl
if I want to. You know what
they say about the little girl
with the curl in the middle
of her forehead, or you don't.
Chopped, cropped, ready
to co-opt stray laughter,
impertinent glances,
insouciant thinking, even
a bit of winking. Bring on
the parade of unremembrance,
rainbows all bows, no rain.
Give blasphemy a whirl.
King Richard III has been sleeping off
the winter of his discontent just below
the concrete of a municipal parking lot
in Leicester.
I could not find the bone you insisted you'd already
thrown my way, or I'd have gnawed on that too,
to take the edge off—or create one.
Wildwood, New Jersey, 2012
(every time)
to fall hard for the red. No matter what I do, no matter what
I say, the green's on its way and my job is to move along,
(every time)
quit my staring.
At this very moment in time, Isabella Cosette Flora Wilhelmina von Matternhaus the Only and Ever is being unreasonably reasonable for a puppy of thirteen weeks of age.
I catch her in the act of being unreasonably reasonable all the time. Right now, she is relaxing reasonably on her little round bed in front of the electric faux-woodstove. She seems to enjoy the flickering electric flames (as do I, as did Sir James) and the warmish if anemic blast of air emanating from the unit.
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars....”
