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C.N.P Poetry 

Writer's pictureCathexis Northwest Press

A Dozen Lip Hugs; I Watch My Mother Play; Once I dreamed—

By: Dale Champlin


A Dozen Lip Hugs


I rest my lips against the soufflé of you,

offer my warm fur as a mother mammal

to your blue-eyed wildcat in free fall,

powder of yellow pollinating your nose

of always-always land. Together, we try

our best to welcome the angels, to trace their wingtips outlined with desire and

unpredictability. It is your childhood that gives me hope—your free-flowing language.

I keep a pillow in my nook for you.

It fluffs when I hold you tight,

a nostalgia of nurturing. I am a marked

grandmother now, you necklace me in shades

of peach and gold, the PJs of au bade.

You will always be my daughter’s precious

primrose. Yes—a form of always—clings like your hug. I have a child to love,

not muzzle. I delight upon your waking. If startled, I shout out the names of goddesses of unborn babes, a ledger of once-upon-a times. I count days and wait for the brush of your lashes—my nervous system a galaxy of whirling constellations.






I Watch My Mother Play


The smallest, she runs out of breath,

learning her place in the wolf pack,

her house locked tight. No key in sight.


Each room hers to rampage—

too bad—if a snake guards the door

—how can she get in?

At dusk she gathers fireflies,

smears their bright juice on her arms

and dark fern-shadow face.

Her brothers pedal her into the gutter,

twist her ankle in their wheel-spokes,

beat her with a sharp stick,

gnaw her like a bone

until she is hollow.

After all the nightmoths


are captured in mason jars

those brothers leave without her.

In darkness she remembers to forget


her terror of inaudible batsong.

But when the moon rises in the east

she feels in her limbs a dance coming on.





Once I dreamed—


we sat together at the end of summer

the cool blue mirror spread before us,

contrails of cocaine lined up in rows

from us to San Francisco.


I hear you as if you are with me now,

calling like sunlight glinting from

the lake’s surface. I am submerged

looking up. My hair floats around me

in green drifts of seaweed waving to


and fro in the current. I can breathe.

I muscle my way through pipes

in my underwater basement.

Flights of stairs rise on either side


like music, the moon scrubs the sky reflected

in my favorite stainless frying pan, and yet—

remember how you taught me heartache

and told me that our love was silly,


that food was poison and

the marrow in our bones was brick

before you threw my pillow into the fireplace.

I cried because I thought it was a bird


with all its feathers burning and the terrible

stench of it made us both sputter and cough

until we choked—a Dolly Parton song

played on the radio, maudlin but true.




 

Dale Champlin is an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine arts. She is the editor of Verseweavers and director of Conversations With Writers. Dale has published in VoiceCatcher, North Coast Squid, Willawaw Journal, Mojave River Press, The Opiate, and other publications. In November, 2019 she published her first collection, The Barbie Diaries, with Just a Lark Books.


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