Feral Willcox

mend

all in a loam, soft dirty home for me and my worms, not a fish place, not a drift, or a split, I am in a medicine of ferns, not succulents, not palm, not prickly pear, I am with bears and purrs of swooping birds, swifts born swallows in an ascendent/descendent air. I am no longer sandstone. I am not granite. I am not igneous worn to pepper form. I am no longer metamorphic, only lone and genuine, sound and bone.
 
god is an alter, diminished from clock to seagrass, she is fertility, ovary, thirsty me; she slakes in episodic oneness then saunters off into my garden of particles. I am a mosaic of her bits of skirt. When she comes, I am hymn

and I steal the silver lining from the cloak made of soothing. It’s soft on you, on your cherished parts. Pull warm from waves. From feather eyes. Until you have been despised, until you are forced to apologize, you have not travelled the scope of love 

like the sunflower crumbled to a dull summer, feathered into memory gone to seed with lentils, peas, the vertical world scattered to flat potential while under surfaces, tellinids siphon detritus, suck meaning into simple pulses, a binary of water in, out, pluffs of aquatic dust left as discarded breath; we think we listen, but we hide in roseate fungi, instants of bliss, she has been long unattended, spreads horizontally unnoticed by religions towering around her

the rain is vulgar, lustral, soft on meadowskin; light goes wonky in crystal fractures, tickles the yellow jacket of a candle in chill flicker. She is in this, in us, blesses the curse to a faltered whisper, war stumbles, falls

now fold geraniums along their veins, split crisp in acrid rain, rinse scripture to zinc blue pools, drip down scalloped pages; silver love then sculpts a pumpkin from a potted child, years before she’s spotted, plucked, carved into smile; now dress the moon, hide her hair in headscarves of meteors; she is calm at the edge of air

**
 
From “A Glossary of Snow”

daughter of pearl
a hard snow born from a harder snow, under the hard shell of a dull grey sky 

In an era of hollow dolls lost in warspell, sororities of the pearled-up poor, glamour girls pushed from great depressions into chorus lines, high kicks and cattle calls of drunken flesh swirled in a syrupy cocktail of dresses, pleats and flounces, cleavages, pearlescent romances, crooning juniors of blue-blood seniors, shills of swindlers, big brass boards of hidden hitlers melting their hot silver spoons into shrapnel kisses milked from winter skies uddered with promises, falling, falling as tin cups filled with snow rattle off into the steaming rubble of true love, I’ll be waiting for you, dear, with home appliances and recipes, the basics of home-economics, the rich give a gift to the poor, another war.

And from this mess, a batch of sticky mothers spewed out of factories into domestic bliss to put ribbons on things, babies, oak trees, dreams easy-baked in swollen ovens. Up against match games in magazines of perfection, straight seams of silk, pin curls at napes of necks on the chopping block. The soldier might be bored. The child might need changing. The lingerie might be spotted with messy bleeding.
  
Girls born from girls born from girls, daughter of pearl, a hard snow born from a harder snow, under the hard shell of a dull grey sky
**

Breaking Fast

When Socrates had cannoli with Mussolini after a steaming plate of mussels, Plato ran from the cave screaming I am! I am! (I think) to Sam, who isn't green like the eggs from the neo-chickens of the risen daughter of Descartes, poached with coupled dumplings and ham; pass the hemlock, please to all the neo-trees of the faux family, cheerfully evergreen, participating eagerly in the controlled burn of therapies spawned in the corporate neo-feudal milieu of modernity - just like it always was, love: pressure, pleasure and please, maybe just a hint of a shift hidden in the well between the bucket seats of SUV's (we were looking for keys) on the way to Trader Joe's (get some pasta, will you, and some cheese) for a breakfast of tyranny and bacon in the sunny nook of
neo-now, sipping herbal cures for the diseases of captivity, saturated to the point of drowning in the satisfying french-fry whine of NPR (I'm Ira Flato) (I'm Sylvia Paggioli) while no one is listening to anyone live - not really listening, you know, like the waves listen to the sand as they're breaking.
 
**
 
Meditation 

See, then, a cat went down and I bought a Moroccan tray, or was it Mongolian, and there was a kiss on the lips, the inhale and exhale of a body pressed close in a theater where there was a poetry slam late on a Saturday. I went with Alice who introduced me to the woman who played Prospero in the Tempest the last time I was here in the big city that is all about cars and parking, traffic and driving and I am here on this blue cushion sitting while a woman in front of me says “Trust." And I kept thinking of you and labeling it "thinking" and thinking of other things, like crazy I was thinking, spinning in circles thinking thinking thinking and I made you do things in my thoughts, things maybe you would never do but that I wanted you to do, maybe, and other people did and said other things that maybe they would never do or say but I could try these things on like clothes that I might or might not buy while time and space, where I might or might not live come at me relentlessly and I make up these filters out of thoughts like I could decide myself whether or not you said this or did that to me as the scenario machine churns out smoke and bubbles, a Really Really Big Show and I say things back to the TV that make me noble and kind and wise and incredibly sexy while the woman sitting in front of me as I'm sitting on the cushion says Wide Open Heart like this was some kind of good idea and she says Genuine and Vulnerable like these things were good ideas too, so I embraced the warm feeling and the cold one and I wrote all of this down in a Cracker Barrel a little ways north of Valdosta thinking about the cat that went down in the Mongolian tray that I bought, or Moroccan maybe, how the cat chose the tray as his last safe place on this whole big amazing planet and how we all cried, Debbie, Rhonda and I, when I brought the tray in to the vet's so the cat could lie in it one more time before the vet said, it's time. I thought Rhonda wouldn't ever stop crying then. She cried and she cried and she cried. So I got in my car for the drive home put on some music and thought about the word genuine - how we never know when we buy something what it might be for, why we pick the one with the dull finish instead of the shine, the longer one, and not the shorter one because a cat on his last day might want just that tray just that way and then all thoughts of marriage and all kisses dropped away because you sent me an e-mail once that was incredibly beautiful and kind but I told you it was Patronizing and I didn't know why I said that but now I do. It was because I lied. Because it was a night that I hurt, but I wanted to pretend I was fine and I hadn't heard from you in a while and I wanted to pretend I didn't need you then so I talked about Brian and his progress and every other thing but about the chair. The chair in the back building of the Catholic church where the art show blew open my world that day, but I didn't want to cry so I lied and I lied and I lied.
 
**

Red of Tooth

It lives in a picture, the truth. This is where I saw a rat secrete itself, behind the stories of eyes. A clear cut rapture collapses there. I’m tired most days. When it rains I hurl cancer pills in handfuls into winds. My joy is stored in caves of glut with the hoarded excess of cornered wealth. Tips of wands curl from my intent. Dandelion springs up in the ash of my experiment with the magic Italians gather, curls of madrigals between the legs of praise. The claw is low, at the base of my throat, closing. 

I saw a rat secrete itself behind a picture. This is where it lives. 
 
**
 
You and Your Dead Seed 

I.  

The aberration was the fish. It was like a king to the whelk, melonish as it scalped by in a treason of wild belly while the rest of us skulked in great green jellies of grass. The aberration was the deep cold below, and the hot rotting wish to leap up from a postulate bestiary, then to rule it.

II.  

She’s wearing her cheap cashmere again for everyone to see. Bits of fiber, woven in to polyester. We know the white rose is silk, or something like. And the spoon, silver as a sky buried in cotton grown from slave labor, flecks of sun red lashing at the horizon. She’s shearing her grey hare for its incendiary fur, but what to burn? Surely not the flag of a tail deer-leapt in hot peaks of moonshine on the lake. So much at stake. We can at least speak. 


III.  

Now bring the rich man close; he is missed from the sky, a self-propagating, misfolded conformer garbed in a special dress of old boreal forests. He is a toilet paper bride, a virology made of you and your dead seed. We are a spiral arm in a disk of dark, we are color and dust, we are dandelion fluff sprayed in a babylon of birdsong. See the mountain, greening. This is where we loudly hide. 
 
**

Candle

We are snuffed limp wick in fingers of wind, from a crust of cooling stuff on a molten bed we begin, lost in motion, swaddled in cultural mess, we coalesce in a nothingness of pimply stuff grown to a pulp from inelastic scattering spawn of some deep belonging, nowhere/here; we are boson wild, all vows earthbound, all stars of sporadic gowns in bear-drawn carriages parading 
the night sky, marriages of the decorative rich describe meaning-filled constellations, drawn rings of meteors. We imitate their owning. We are unchosen. Why, then, shine? 

We spring for gold in kind up from under rain, then thunder, mulled in sun, under some nominal sky. We finger some fungible love rolled in yellowed dung. We’re beetles sold in volatile markets dried with scrotal orchids, day traded bodily grunge. We are thought of as solid but serve no model, bound, dispersed, strapped to a saddle; we are grist and curl in a sack full of swamp, the soil of us, and a candle 
 
**

A Blessing for the Uncurious Inattentive Light

It’s a barking dog land you pray me out from into a christian tale of two pots calling the kettle to a boil, a rolling boil of sheep's wool, a yelp escapes the bent lid, and there was sleep where there had been none because I was warm. I was warm in a cold land and I was near in a far land, and there was no christmas but there were trees. Trees and trees and trees.
 
I saw you, then, same as before, eyes paled over - you stormed out of a deep rain, your clothes soaked and plain as daylight fading. Five times I circled you, five times I cried. Five times I warned you of slime mold on the rise. In the end, I found myself dying.

What makes the circle go still? What makes the grass roots tickle the ass of the castle, the subtle perception make its way into the coarse? What makes the honey dribble across the marble table, the carousel stall, the ferris wheel, and the sparrow, the round bone chip, the gutter snipe slip the halo from a lit globe out from under holy? 

And why are you stealing into my house through a window at night by Willis Still Road with sunsweet kin as swifts pull star cloth across the rose reach of leaving light? Send the cedar waxwings then, to pray for your stray sister lost in cheap fleece with the dalit on the silk road from earnestness, shame, over-responsibility to lightness, laxity, genuine presence, loose bowels and bitter tea. From there I saw nothing but electricity and darkness and Mars.

Here, the far mountain body is awash with crows. The governing body overthrows itself, throws itself up into a stellar confetti drifting slowly with the space station. I want one of the ones I once wanted. I want Wanting. 

The inner body sweetens in to sun, liquifies eyes of spun lotus, iris flints glisten the grey way to constellations, swarms of fish repatriating the patterned sky underfoot, finned strides kin-swim an ease into run drops of steps. The urgency of a dying earth releases its grief in me and I smile. Weep, and smile. 

The power is out again. The near mountain body weakens in the rain. Wake up, the Fire Rabbit said, the moon in our teacups spills out spellspin stillskin, now onto then. 

**
 
By Then the Picnic Will Seem Fun

I say, sir, can you get the thing hung up by the crow, can you pile up the thing and its mother slung by the toe to a corner humped over? By then the gilded fingers drumming dung into tinnitus bent by false staccato, slipped like benzo's into a dull talk of dolls - by then you will know a roosting, corrupt, in the rare fir, higher than air. 

The morphed rich perch and watch the drone, ghost of a soldier, unholstered remote flashing Strike, now, Strike. By then the picnic will seem fun. I say, sir, we are all drunk on the Chilcot report. Can you kill it off before the lab blows up and the young are dunked in the rising sea?

They'll be wondering at the pictures of us and our birthday cakes. They'll be wondering why we were laughing, laughing, laughing

**
 
Sky

One-fingering the dawn spot, two-toned stone, soaked clot at the throat of morning; neo-robber barons croon in the rain of mad cow heaven. Takers gloom, teflon womb born shelled pea, husk of corn, crabbed as a smile of charm learned young from God. She drank us like shakes at a long forgotten counter, shiny with promise, shabby with coin thin lips and eyes at once a gleam and a violence; a mother's tongue split as a clit into manipulative silken underthings, wings of duplicity, flight divided from sound.

The arch of the river’s neck sketches moonspine into sand at the bank, impermanent with alluvial language and rounded riparian mounds at the bends of understanding. The quorum is a seamless song, status beaklipped along a ream of skied river steaming from the deep well of shame, lymph undrained, swelling, stemming from the bellyfish that circles the mother of hiding.

When it was water into water and the footpath for miles became a river, it was then I started to get better because I would be baptized from the sky or never.
 
**
 
Feral Willcox is a musician and poet living in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, U.S.  Her work has appeared in Per Contra, Rogue Agent, SWWIM, Peacock Journal and elsewhere. She was regularly published and featured in the Plath Poetry Project, was a featured poetry performer at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and has been an annual featured reader at the Chiang Mai Magic Theater Poetry group.