Jonterri Gadson
Cling
We both grip the fountain's
damp lip, lose our knuckle tips just beneath the water's surface, our cheeks lift into simultaneous hello smiles, while the ivy spreads like fresh disease in the corner's shadow. We've come here to talk about us. Had I known freedom could matter so much, I would have loosed the ivy’s vines from the cold stone hold of that mildewing, chipped, brick wall then; would have plucked each leaf off above their stems, let the vines sprawl naked in the dirt like earth's veins. I'd had enough of watching the slightest changes ripple our reflections unrecognizable. You'd grown tired of the shade shifting, had enough of trying. Still, we walked out together, our wind rustling the evergreen ivy that, unlike us, would lose nothing for clinging, climbing, desperate, struggling to rise toward an unreachable sun. Finding Idaho
Your first mistake is believing
every aerial photo of anywhere shows the roll of sagebrush over the singed desert valley-- symptoms of a slow-setting sun. Eyes that never leave a mother’s windows believe they’ve found home in the first cluster of roofs in a cul-de-sac, believe they know each troubling pass— how steep, how thin, how rocky, where the road has no railing, the exact spot where you learned to yield. Home Improvement
Rust scars surviving colors
in Seattle’s skyline, spreads as scabs across red scrap metal, rots in speckles over yellowing fences, blossoms like bruises on a blue shed in a backyard where he pummels a cement patio to dust as a hobby. Her face in the window reflects wet ruin, counts each punished stone. |
Symptoms of a Slow Setting Sun
Think sagebrush rolling, no high-pitched
oo wee oo wee oooo, no gray western flick, real tumbleweed passes through high beams on two lane roads, sticks in your wheel sockets. This town cut in on the desert’s dance with forest-shawled mountains, left her laying sun-licked, brush ablaze, bulldozed for paved roads, intersected. Suffer a sleight of hand, a misplaced moment of reflection and nearby cliffs will kill you. Here, the sun is a woman’s full breast, tickled by tip-tops of evergreens, this is her blushing sky. She’s the light that saves or maims you, depending on how bent she is to shine. No one has touched me for weeks
yet in this drugged, gilt afternoon, late, when nothing is safe, I’m paralyzed, as though so wildly desired -from “Midas Passional” by Lisa Russ-Spaar .
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