By: Stephanie L. Harper
Aubade with Smoke
That i left my window opened
last night, letting in wildfire smoke
as i drifted off to the melody
of Katydids lullabying
in the waxing crescent’s red haze,
explains my waking this morning
to eyes tearing, the huskiness
in my throat, limbs still heavy
with song-sweet sleep, & the strange,
deep orange of smoke-subdued rays,
but not my drowning.
Culpability on that latter count
falls to the un-receding
deluge that was my dream,
the opus magnum i’d composed
to get you alone,
& let myself be flooded—
o!—
but how cruelly i was torn
from your arms by the “friend”
my conscience must’ve conjured up,
whose happening along unshadowed us
from the sultry elms’ intertwining depths,
& left me drifting away on the pulse
of his cool reproof: don’t! don’t!
Now, as i rise to the dawn’s breezy
August heat already stoking
its defiance of yesterday’s firelines,
with your name seared on my lips,
i am ablaze.
Dilated
To think that we see them so often yet so rarely
consider how those piebald songbirds so at home
on a snow-scape in their portable parkas are made of
the exact same stuff we use to fill up our electric sky & neon
watermelon nylon winter coats which must be designed
expressly for us to go out there looking ridiculous
not to mention callous (clothed as it were in outright exploitation)—
is the thing I’m pondering as I observe through the window
a little house finch all feathery & poofed with his flushed cheeks
flitting over the snowy patio pecking among the abandoned
bench-feet for invisible if not entirely non-existent morsels
& hawking an air of self-possession that is obvious even to me
in my current incapacitated state
As for whether the red-crowned retina specialist
who conducted my examination was young &/or fetching
the prospect was murky (his brisk entrance at the climax
of my dilation coupled with his expertly-executed clasp
of my hand inspired my fleeting impression he’d been both)
& all bets were off the very moment the white-cloaked smeary
hulk of him ambushed my defenseless retinas with an impossibly
aggressive radiant device thus affording me the pivotal elucidation:
that a). the anomaly on my fundus autofluourescence images
is simply an unremarkable patch of variegated pigmentation
b). it was only natural to expect that the definition
of such a lexical wonder as variegated would elude the layperson
& c). I am indeed obliged by gratuitous pigeonholing
to take categorical offense
Not that I’m usually so bold as to co-opt medical jargon
but I’m pretty certain variegated is the only word that could
aptly account for what’s right now comprising the better part
of my visual experience as embodied by this polka-dotty
aberration also known as a scone I resorted to purchasing
in the hospital café thus affording myself the pivotal illusion:
that a). I’m quite absorbed in an earnest task
while waiting here in the lobby for my ride
b). I wouldn’t otherwise be averting
my freakish black gaze from passersby
because c). I’m the kind of person
who always smiles at everyone as if to say
I accept you for who you are no matter what…
I’ve gathered that the dark splotches must be
cranberries—however vainly their vague sweet-tang
serves to redeem their crumbly substrate’s alleged
alimentary function
Still the finch remains staunchly committed
to my functional blindness as if by sheer force of his
impending command its concomitant scone-silage
would transcend the glass & sift to the frozen ground
What a Patriot Dreams
I saw the flags come down—
in a scene that scrolled in slo-mo,
& from multiple vantages—
their masts falling like the trees
flattened by shockwaves
in those clips of old footage
from military nuclear bomb tests,
spliced into documentaries
for high school history classes;
except, my dream version’s vivid images
weren’t the projected celluloid etchings
that teenagers confined to plastic chairs
could summarily cancel from sight
with one hand motioning No
in the universal vernacular.
From a sweeping arc of floodlights
that rendered the indigo skyline
of an early-summer dusk starless,
the flags all vanished at once—
their wingless heaps of red-white-blue
crushing in on themselves, darkening,
& dropping like torn parachutes.
Sleep’s last claim on my consciousness
was that horizon of empty haloes
the mass plummet had left behind,
before my eyes fluttered open
to this morning’s first, grainy insinuations
that breached the blinds’ periphery,
& accreted into a single, silent force
creeping along my bedroom walls,
as if it could somehow thwart illumination
of my most preposterous, waking truth:
that in this country of my own
birth & citizenship, I’ve, in turn,
given birth to two, precious children—
my riven heart’s two halves now trussed
in a spectacular fiasco of feathers & wax.
Stephanie L. Harper holds an M.A. in German literature from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and author of the chapbook, *This Being Done* (Finishing Line Press). Her poems appear in such journals and anthologies as Slippery Elm, Isacoustic*, Rat's Ass Review, Panoply, Underfoot, Stories that Need to Be Told (TulipTree Publishing, LLC), and elsewhere. She lives in Hillsboro, OR with her husband, children and a cattle dog named Sydney. Visit Stephanie online at slharperpoetry.com.
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