folio : short takes on the prose poem
The prose poem has become almost the only form I work in. As I was discovering my voice as a poet, my poetry found it’s way into this form, and it seems to be the perfect container for what I am doing—writing half poem dream sequences half story. My writing can also be a bit (or very) ungrounded, so the prose poem form helps to ground the words a bit more in this world.
We were throwing plates in the chapel. In the annex, we were smashing one thousand spirit bottles and scattering the Milagros.
When I stole the communion crackers and consumed them, I felt righteously withered. When I drank the wine, I was a jealous fool.
In the funeral room, I felt a hidden form of violence. My caseworker said, “There is a medicine for that.” I placed a bowl of fur on the alter then slit open my finger. “This is my medicine,” I said.
In the theatre of therapy they pulled testimonies from me. I was forced to forgive my aggressor. I nursed a wounded animal back to health and nearly fell into a hibernation.
I had mastered the archetype of the dress-maker. I had cleansed myself of all symbology concerning the snake and had dressed up in an ascension motif.
It was as if I
woke up backwards from a dream, with thistles in my mouth, but no one could
tell me if I was bleeding.
In a secret death-ritual, when I play the apostle, I say things like: If I even hint at fur, the animals will come.
When my stablemate plays the messiah, it’s not even really fiction. She says, “I’m here to save no one, not even myself,” then bites into a vegetable.
When she reads my starchart, I’m cornered in the bathroom. She says the stars say that Saint Agatha is the ghost I should bet my future on.
She says if I am a heretic than I am doing my job right, but if I have even the slightest fever, then I am the one that should be blamed for the plague.
When we triage each other in the prayer room, it is the middle of the night, and we’ve put down our weapons.
We are damaged animals fresh with lilies.
In the garment room, we are wide-eyed martyrs bandaging our wounds.
Having been tormented by ghosts and by prophecies, having been tormented by violent love and bad telepathy, having been wrestled to the earth of this sad house and having been under fire for our testimonies
we close the drawers of our bodies and practice crawling toward a more perfect devastation.
When I was a witch, I ate my own scabs and could feel anything. I could count vegetables all day without even trying.
But my stablemate said we have five deaths between us. That our illness is a night-mold and, because of this, we are stuck here hiding behind the lemon trees, clutching bouquets of witch hazel.
“When I ate their magic,” she whispered, “I was a perfect doll for them. I could fall into the bushes and come up all gorgeousness riven-hued. I could fall into the butchers and come up all yellow-fabriced—yes!
But when I refuse their magic, I am a christ unto myself. A rider coming in for the evening with the fish I caught dying in my arms.
No one believes what we are capable of,” she says, “that’s why they brutalize us like saints, gauze-wrapped and feral, that’s why they wrestle us to the ground and stick needles in our arms or pins in our faces.”
Remember when I made that tincture out of funeral root and distilled ether?
There was a flock of feral birds hovering over our medicinals and you were working on a screenplay involving the Universal Mother
or else you were creating complex itineraries involving the Universal Mother. We were outside The Library of Miniature Dresses practicing other people’s animal voices.
Either I was sharpening my jasmine blade or you were digging for edible roots.
“I can talk to my deities without spilling weapons everywhere,” you said. You were reading a book called Think Life is Coming and I was tracing a passage from The Doll Tome. It said:
“The Doll Tome is part orthodoxy, part heresy. For example, to become an expert with blades, to become a heresy artist and to know how to fine tune your blades, one must enter through the passages of The Doll Tome.”
Outside The Library of Miniature Dresses I am practicing my cemetery voices or you are posing in the very psychological postures of a bird.
And I am reading my favorite passage from The Doll Tome.
It says: “You are the light memorized by the field in a wilderness of small animals and chandeliers.”
Inside the library, they are showing reel of historical animal footage:
A flock of antiseptic birds breathe through the grasses
One hundred thousand landscapes containing deer
Everyday fish iconography
The voice-over is licking grass and biting through trees or biting birds between the snow. “Every ant contains a portion of my terror,” he says, rubbing his eyelids with soil and repeating his favorite passage from The Doll Tome:
“Between sleep a treat of grief is scattered over our heart. But when I turn toward you, my secrets are identical to yours.”
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