By: Caroline Rowe
Unrequited Easter
She knew it wasn’t going to come,
like the package or the angel,
the iced hibiscus tea the waitress forgot,
the reply from the guy who taught her
how to whistle real loud in the asylum.
It would not come
from that white time-out.
She only remembered who saw
what tears fall.
She’d charted its migrations,
carved out its lines on the Coltrane album
like gunpowder fuses,
tattooed ellipsoids on her fingers in Greece.
She’d collected the materials: sewing box,
swapped paperbacks, razor-burn cream, rosewater,
a chicken in the freezer, friends.
Meanwhile, our red letter days marching
off the summit of some Calvary.
Our red letter days candied
with lipstick and breakfast,
each blood-jeweled match tip burned away.
By the morning when they read
her girlhood Easter prayer,
she steeped in the rained on grasses.
She was closed in her white dress.
She was closed in the regal crypt.
In her own time or out,
out of her own loop, she knew
the hoax of peace, the flaws
of her Good Old Boy father
who’d punched a hole in the shrink’s wall,
who’d now spend his fortune on lacquered
benches and plaques in her honor. She knew
who he was. She’d been holding out for his Jesus,
who rose from the dead only to leave us
again. She waited, waded out,
a sigh in the stifle,
while the sun backed off
into another dark corner
and what skies or waves were left for her
grew warmer,
she knew.
Water, Fire, Water
Water, fire, water.
Sun in your moon.
I questioned the stars
whom you’d first deemed
liars. Your birth chart
confided, fixed:
Water, fire, water.
Scorpio’s ice,
solar flare, sweat thaw.
I’m a loose clod
or clay to lather,
Earth, water, earth,
a rock you lifted.
I’m still looking
down on that ground where
you first turned me
over, where all
creation oozes,
where Jehovah’s
tawny belly folds
into itself.
You rant like the Book,
a mad father,
powerful geyser
from the boulder,
primordial well.
The horses go
down on you, flatten
your magnitude,
Serpents are drunk on
the afterbirth
of ducklings. Under
your boots, music
of leaves crushed alive.
Each stalk and vine
crammed into frame. I
splay blasphemous,
raise your hair like grass.
Water, shyly
joining itself. Fire
doused, extinguished.
We, Apocryphal
lovers hidden
in the underbrush,
where it’s so lush
and fertile, but you
want to get lost
in the dead desert
with just my heart,
the sun’s claws shredding
the manna off
your back like lint, snow.
Earth, water, earth.
Water, fire, water.
Boil over. Steam.
The sniper stars sow
their sabotage.
Interment
That crystal of inertia,
when the pills kicked in again.
Umbrella overhead,
bleeding violin:
oh the sadism,
the stretch.
She was dead,
and we hovered.
I felt the rain on the back of my neck,
but it may have been sweat,
or my prolific, sticky tears.
I felt wet
in the nape of my neck,
then I didn’t feel a damn thing,
not for many years.
Caroline Rowe (née Zimmer) is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and lifelong resident of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Adanna, Seems, The Raw Art Review, and The Jabberwock Review, where she was named a finalist for the Nancy D. Hargrove Editor's Prize. Her debut chapbook, God's Favorite Redhead, is forthcoming from Lucky Bean Press.
About my poetry, maybe my own, ever-encouraging mother said it best:
“I never fully comprehend it at the start. I just let the lines soak in, appreciate the words, the way they sound. Then, there’s a turning point where it all becomes clear. By the end, I understand each image has significance, personal and emotional. Nothing is accidental. Then, I know I’ll have to read the poem again, and it will have double the impact.”
I received this very sweet text message from my mother, after sending her “Unrequited Easter,” “Interment,” and “Water, Fire, Water.” Immediately following, in a fit of trademark self-deprecation, she lamented her lack of eloquence on the subject. She, like so many, persists in feeling like an inadequate reader of poetry. No, Mom. You do get it. Now that that’s officially on the record, here is some background on the aforementioned poems.
“Unrequited Easter” and “Interment” both focus on the death of Kendall Michelle Daigle, who passed away of a heroin overdose one week shy of her twentieth birthday.
Her posthumous collection of writings can be found on https://asoulunderconstruction.com/.
“Interment” briefly divulges a few details about her burial, grounded in my own perspective. In “Unrequited Easter,” the “it” is intentionally manifold, but refers, most literally, to the Easter that Kendall did not live to see and to the tranquil, fulfilling life she believed she would never have access to.
“Water, Fire, Water” is an exploration of elemental angst. In this poem, I have employed a strict syllabic count of 5-4-5 (“fire,” with my ever so slight Southern accent, being pronounced monosyllabically). Alchemical, astrological and Biblical imagery, combined with the rhythmic syllabic structure, aims to create a moody, incantatory air of eroticism.
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