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Angele Ellis


​Reply to Billy Collins’s
​“The Lanyard”

The other week I was ricocheting 
off the bloody walls of my psyche
as another pale cis male friend’s face
softened over Billy Collins’s “The Lanyard.”
I found myself searching out the word
in an unholy host of electronic dictionaries.
I have seen people use lanyards. 
You can wear one to hold a whistle,
as women do, walking mean streets--
or a knife, though not one as large 
as the blade my coworker Marietta Melton 
brandished in the subways of Philadelphia.
Every day, she braided her daughter’s hair 
by the filthy Schuylkill, beading the strands--
black over red, white, and blue. 
But a lanyard is not only a chain.
A lanyard is a lifeline, saving a ship’s sails
as they strain in opposing winds,
whiter than milk from a mother’s breast
or the formula I sucked from a rubber nipple.
But this poem was going to be about how
as the oldest of five children birthed
in fewer than six years, I gave my mother
a lot more than a damn camp lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is how you prepare them.
Here is your right-hand girl, I said,
which you made with a little help from the patriarchy.
But this is what I want to say to her now: 
Here is the larger gift. Not the sentimental fantasies
that cling to power like rich old Republicans,
but the grateful admission that despite endless chores
from your and my hands, I was as sure as a girl could be
that the songs I wove from love and longing
were not useless and worthless things, and that alone
would be enough to make us even. 
​

Maske Freiheit

space between skin and surface
bandage that warms like flesh
eyes framed or hooded 
mouth a hacked Vendetta grin

strips of newsprint lathered
with flour and water
each layer dried completely
before adding the next
when you are finished 
you can drill it just like wood

he said
I see how you use 
writing
to talk about yourself
without talking about yourself

pages fan the podium
drafts sleet the floor

the grain we go against
the figure in the carpet retreating
the yellow wallpaper read
in a certain slant of light

the headlines of the world
​

Flashover

~ The sudden spread of flame over an area 
when heated to the flash point

​
too armored to feel

searching for bodies
our gaze is forced upward

counting as the flames
in the control chamber
rise to this moment

near the melting point
smoke clouds churn
the room goes dark

flashover

blue-white fingers beckon
from the roiling ceiling
as if to guide us

on each new call
we must decide
whether to stare into the fire

or flush it out​
​

my invisible woman  ☊

had vulcan green veins beneath her clear carapace
like the ones rising on the back of my hand / flesh i chew raw
in my sleep. no map to anywhere / my aging chrysalis
imperfect as she was perfect / down to implied fingernails
her blank face / bald transparent casing / for a smug pink walnut.

her seven magic openings were soldered with plastic
invulnerable even when i buried her in shaley dirt.
i crowned her with pitchblende / radium trapped in greasy peaks
of luster. her heart was wrapped red meat / while mine turned
lump of black crystals / x-ray power burning through its cracks.

so many times i wanted to travel / to climb out of there.
only once did i come close to the mountainous border.
wellbutrin shot pure night through my willing capillaries
pulling my invisible woman back to her safety box
whose cardboard dark quelled hunger like holy communion.

this is what i never told you / friend i never would have met
when i woke / before the failure on my fissured tongue 
leaked apology / ineluctable acid from its dying 
battery of excuses / memories I could not contain
disappointment tore at me / stripped me like cellophane.
​

13 Ekphrases for Louise Bourgeois'
​Blooming Janus

Picture
Louise Bourgeois, "Janus Fleuri," 1968. Click to enlarge.
 
  1. The bearded twins who look forward, gaze back.
  2. Zeus’ brow after Athene burst forth armed and dangerous. 
  3. Gods hurt by their own desires.
  4. A god who remains lamed—Hephaestus, immortal mender of metals. 
  5. Damaged heart hanging like a locket from a lover’s neck.
  6. Dead deer strapped to a truck, hooves to the cloven sky. 
  7. Willendorf Venus worshipped or tamed by the sculptor’s chisel. 
  8. Emily’s poems—female lava frozen by basilisk breath. 
  9. No one wants the hymen to remain un/broken.  
  10. Two-faced helmet, is war inevitable? 
  11. It is happening within our bodies as I write.
  12. Decay puddled inside shells like melted bronze. 
  13. If they let me touch your skins, my split might heal.
​
Picture


Angele Ellis' Profile

Uncle Memory

​A basket of fruit on a circlet of plastic lace
is scented polymer, false promise of a greengrocer.
My nose sniffs out orange, apple, grape, banana--
 
as if we’re shopping. Someone could break dentures
on these. My uncle has teeth, but his mind separates
into the soft wax of the past. An orange recalls
 
his childhood Christmases. Grape is the altar wine
he sips—sidelined—at concelebrated Mass.
Apple, the orchards bordering the final parish
 
he knows. Banana, lost—South American mission
beyond signposts of memory. “You brought me this
from Guatemala.” The silver bangle dangles
 
on my still-unspotted wrist. He nods politely,
like someone hearing a foreign language,
as if attention could rename events in the mist.
 
Banana, grape, orange, apple—chopped fruit salad,
served in compotes by a woman from Belarus.
The illusion of a restaurant preserved because
 
she escorted us to the private dining room
with a sympathetic nod. He knows me only
because my face retains the shape of an old print.
 
He calls me by my girlhood nickname; he lets me
take his hand. I hold it. As the smell of plain soap
rises, I find myself grateful for everything--
 
this clean pleasant revenant of my demented uncle,
bland nourishment in a house of ancient priests,
normalcy in a bowl of artificial fruit.
​

Morning Glory

The morning glory I cut in fury, wild tendrils
choking my careful plantings, strains to come back--
poking clover green through brown mulch,
making me pluck bad luck every week—pale
resilient stems and root hairs, deceptively meek.
 
I was meek, before I went mad—too easy to bury
in the shredded muck of my life. My variegated
mane, like a corpse’s, grew out in coffin darkness.
Tenacious follicles pulled me through rotting wood
and earth. I coughed up breath-bubbles of mercury.
 
Sixty percent water—and still I rise, I rise
with the carbon-paper blossoms of dawn,
the trammeled river glinting under new skies.
My face redevelops, a silver gelatin landscape
baring teeth like a mountain range,
pouring unforgiving sunlight from its eyes. 
​

Valediction Without Central Metaphor

​You were my coup de foudre, my love at first sight.
In French, this means stroke of lightning—electricity
running through my stunned body from crown to sole.
Love, you were blind. From birth, your eye muscles
 
twitched, your deep nearsightedness strained beyond
correction—much less cure--by any surgery or lens.
Congenital vertical nystagmus—life sentence
to magnified text, to voice synth, to print pressed
 
close to your gorgeous face. A petal between pages
I shut to keep blooming somehow. A wing’s shadow.
All the sad songs that make blindness a metaphor
for failure, unperceived fortune, letting me/you go,
 
I must redact, skipping at that phrase—scratched
record, heart’s needle jumping and moving on. Love,
I tried to say goodbye without leaving, but no--
the radiance of your presence receded from my flesh.
 
Once we walked hand in hand, pressure of small
fingers on sinuous palm affectionate and directional.
I cherished everything about you—your monocular
scanning street signs, a steampunk periscope. The cane
 
you hated, albino spider crouched folded by the wall.
Love, oh careless love—the quiver of your mood-ring eyes,
darkening to blue, drew me to your sky, both canopy
and ground for coupling. Shaken by the foreplay of desire.
​

Poetry

Inside the big tent, we are watching
real toads in imaginary gardens.
Blooms and tendrils glisten, watered
silk under a naked coat of glycerine.
The toads blink, lumps of dirt and spit.
We catch them with our hands in the field.
They piss our palms in defensive terror.
That stink is as stubborn to get out as ink.

The toads look as bored as we feel. The crowd 
cries for meme clowns and horses. Daring
young men on a redacted flying trapeze, gliding
on strips of dark air with the greatest of ease.
We live in a wheel / where everyone steals.
You sigh. The first smoke curls from your nostrils.
An arsonist, febrile as a smoldering cigarette,
hooks the line on waxed canvas, where it bursts

into a famous many-fingered ball of fire.
The crowd rears. Wallace Stevens looks up 
from his polished desk, thinking, The tragedy, 
however, may have begun. On the grounds,
the women and children and drifters of Hartford 
are burning. We work on in the panic 
of numberless dead, in the trauma of children--
barely scorched—like the giant cats that flowed

on instinct down black chutes into a world 
patched round. Afterward, only their feline minds
could bear the shouts, the memory of flame.
And Little Miss—her face unmarked except
for a sleeping shadow and a scorched bindi--
was buried in flowers, exhumed, buried again.
We could spend a lifetime identifying her.
Furling the big top, walking home from school

in the trampled mud of silence.
​

Absinthe
          Inspired by “Beautiful Girl,” a portrait by Carolyn Pierotti

You pull me into an age of wormwood and jaundice, of models posing for a few sous for men entranced by naked breasts and a touch of the tarbrush. They loved to pose themselves, in slouch hats and linen shirts spattered with oils. But a modern woman captured you, in jarring shades of acrylic. Are you meant as a critique, not-so-beautiful girl with face slightly askew—a model’s mask, disdainful and slightly mad? Poised between the green and the black, Orientalism and the passing line? Absinthe used to blind its tipplers before it killed them. Are we as addicted as they were, feeling the sightless craving for relief in throats replete with sugar cubes and silver spoons?

​
Picture

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