​Not Only Wolves

I’ve heard tell there are shape shifters in the forest preying on men and women alike. Sometimes they are cunning foxes who lure with their sharp wit and quick tongues, charming their victims into submission, holding even passing acquaintances in silvery thrall. Or they can be lazy cats who never change their shape, sitting on laps and feeding on morsels of fish freely given, as a respite from their usually wild and vagrant ways to which they soon return. They only temporarily use human bodies to accomplish a task or catch a free ride, abandoning the husks, still warm and alive, wiped clear of memories. These hapless souls are often found on a garden bench, mumbling and confused, but with blissful smiles emblazoned on their blank faces. These stories emerge from the melting snow or are carried on the summer wind. Perhaps mothers want to warn their daughters, or fathers their sons to be wary of handsome or beautiful strangers because you never know if the body paying such close attention on the bar stool next to yours or on the yoga mat inches from your heart, eyes and teeth unnaturally bright, has secrets and tastes you could never imagine.
 
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The Wisdom of Naming Meteors after the God of Destruction
 
Theoretically, a large meteor could strike earth probably near Japan or China in 2027: Tsunami’s, earthquakes could affect everyone. But just like in the movie Don’t Look Up, Washington  will probably just hem and haw congressing about how to avoid this or that and come up with a dozen useless solutions destined to fail, while the Asians will be busy marketing their T-shirts and go-karts, and insulated cups and blankets emblazoned with the comet, little toy laser beams that aim to shoot it out of the sky before the imminent land disaster and all the while, NASA is busily planning for the real-life event of Apophis, a huge asteroid which will actually be close enough for us to see without a telescope in 2029, and hoping to land some little planetary explorers on it just to gather some data, like the composition of the thing itself, where it came from, when it was born and from what, so they can further study the whole universe and all its mysteries, and then . . . well, then, everyone on the planet will be busily making T-shirts, and wind-up astronauts with fake laser rockets, while the doomsayers will be marching across the land, once again, carrying their heavy placards, searching the skies for a sign.  

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Gabapentin Dreamin'
 
Toy trains wind their way across my bed. Little black cats jump and chase the monarch butterflies fluttering by. I reach to grab them, wondering why, knowing nothing is there, try to pluck a raisin passing by. Later, the nearly full bag of straight-cathed urine comforts my leg with its heat as it forcibly leaves my bruised and rebellious body. Two hundred fine, four hundred fine, eight hundred cc’s “no bueno” as they say on the block. The nighttime dose kicks in and would someone please catch the iguana chomping my flowers up there on the corner of the bed pushed hard against the wall? And yes, the skies are grey.

**

Moving Backwards​

The earth’s core has reversed its magnetic pull, backtracking (like politics the world over) and slowly, the days are getting longer (it doesn’t just feel that way, what with news cycles endlessly repeating—it’s really happening), ticking extra seconds into our standard 24, which eventually will add up, though by then, we’ll have been smashed by the next asteroid that will hit this planet, and then poof! Snuffed out like a bad bulb, up in nothing but fizzle and pop and darkness. The pundits are all warning us already, about how dire this backward spin into our own futures will be but it seems the slap happy Kool-Aid drinkers have not enough imagination left to face the truth, so largely, like the lightbulb, have been left in the dark, where they fumble their own machinations toward the death spiral that is our beloved democracy, going extinct. 

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Little White Lies Should be a Plant

Just sitting in the sun, actually not sitting, but exercising in the pool, the sun on my face, the only sitting done after the pool to drip dry the suit, which reluctantly, I must wear due to other people walking around my house, and even then it’s a lie because I don’t just sit, I go about the yard, clipping this errant branch or pulling that noxious weed, leaving the flowery ones, because even though they’re weeds, there are these little yellow flowers which look at least colourful in the area I call a garden, which is really just a set-back, grass-less strip against the fence where I have pots of various blooming plants whose names I can never remember, even though I wrote them down, but misplaced the paper, and anyhow I wouldn’t know which name belonged to which plant, which come to think of it, is a lie, too, because I do know the Impatiens, and the Dianthus, and especially the Marigolds which are supposed to ward off white flies and other pests that lay eggs all along the leaves wilting them right off the jalapeno peppers and micro cherry tomatoes, remembering the Ginger plants which have some long, odd name I do not remember, which surprise blooms every summer right through the other plants I invariably place over the bulbs each Fall when all the Ginger stalks have wilted, and of course my herbs, Rosemary, Thyme, Basil and the Sweet Mint I cut daily for my water, contemplating the skies before I drag out the hoses and water all these adornments that brighten my spirits every time I walk outside.

**

Oxygen Hunger

​I can’t help but picture those giant koi piled one on top of the other as they fight for the crumbs we’re throwing off the bridge. They stay up so long we can hear their gasping for breath, the watery kind, the kind that goes into their gills, back out as bubbles. We watch with macabre fascination as they choose first food, then life, then food again, not certain which will bring them more joy if fish are ever joyous. With humans, joy is—was—evident, a widespread smile, a giggle of mirth, but not this open-mouthed gasping when nothing is working right, too much water inside the body, not enough oxygen coming in, CO2 going out. They tell us these are end stages, code words for all the cliches we imagine: at death’s door, leaving this world, going to the other side. Perhaps you are only transitioning from man to fish, back to the waters you came from, long, long ago.

**

Something Wicked This Way Comes


Like death. Not always the cloaked and sexless figure holding a scythe; sometimes a white-winged angel with a mournful harp. Not always unwelcome, but always wicked, snatching what it wants, who it chooses ready or not, willing, or not, always a battle. See the crow on the windowsill? Death. The dark and angry sky? Death. The leaves shriveling off the trees? Death. Hear the long, low then high-pitched wails? Death is singing its final song to those left behind, for those it’s taken hear nothing ever again. Death is the mother of sleep, the father of eternal dreams, death is agony, release, comfort and affliction. Death never looks both ways before crossing over, it plunges ahead, sharpens its senses, instinct all it knows, all that matters in the long and the short of it all, until finally, it disappears, taking everything you loved leaving nothing but dust.

**

Barbra Nightingale’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, such as Rattle Narrative Magazine (Poem of the Week, nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Gargoyle, Barrow Street, The Georgetown Review, CRIT Journal, The Apalachee Review, Calyx, Kalliope, Many Mountains Moving, Birmingham Review, Chatahoochee Review, The Comstock Review, Poetrybay.com,  The Mississippi Review.com, The MacGuffin, Crosscurrents, The Kansas Quarterly, Cumberlands Poetry Journal, Passages North, The Florida Review, Swimm.

​The Visitor 
 
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Hebrews 13:2 (KJV)
  
The sharp shot of brass knocker searches room to room—not an echo but a bullet. As I leave my chair, it ricochets again with unsettling vehemence, a swearing. And opening the door, there, in blinding sunlight, is a face with the familiarity of the actress to whom I’m sexually attracted.  I hesitate to invite a scammer or proselytizer into my home, but that is exactly what I do. We sit in the living room just off the entry, but she declines my offer of tea with a women’s-college graciousness. A satchel of business gray disguises its spiritual contents. She talks in aphorisms while retrieving coloured folders from its darkness. I am ready for her spiel, but she pleasantly chastises me for my many failings. She seems bitter. Pleading ignorance, I squirm, ask questions to tie connotation to her words like bundling insurance to save money. She handles my cleverness with ease, countering with a few metaphors I don’t quite catch. Only a few minutes later, she rises to go like a retired school teacher. The air between us glows. We are un-bullied friends by now and we shake hands to prove it. She says that I owe her with a measure of meaning, a compelling art, and leaves one sample on the coffee table. It is a collection of poems I could have written; covers frayed, marginalia smudged. After she has smiled, the door closes; I flip through the pages with a thumb. A love-letter flutters to the floor. I can’t recall her name now, but my signature wrote itself neatly in the space provided like an alcoholic unaware he’s in a liquor store buying death for himself and others.
 
**
 
 Mischief
 
Somebody has taken the fork in the road— the stainless steel one noticed on my walk two days ago, lying brash between yellow lines dividing northbound from southbound, ignored by the coming and going of eastern promise and western regret. Yet, not meant to confuse by its accident, but amuse I suppose, the ordinary thing made special by odd context. Now in an absent choice, the sense of loss is profound. Someone saw no humor in leaving it: trash is trash and took it.
 
**
  
Images in Aggregate
 
Sabbe samkāra dukkha. (All conditioned things are unsatisfactory/suffering.) 
The Dhammapada  #278
  
Unweathered replacement boards in the junkyard’s grungy gray fence read like a bar-code for the sun to scan—parallels that will never meet. White Thanksgiving turkeys crammed four to a cage, stacked onto tractor-trailers litter feathers for many miles— sacrificed to tradition. Dozens of pelts or fish hang in old black and white photographs, buffalo bones piled saloon high—abundance bragged to extinction. Behind vinyl siding, houses rot the way politicians barter their integrity— secrets reside in black redactions. Cynicism cannot be our only hope. Coffee-soaked, layered with mascarpone, lady fingers are placed side by side for the tiramisu of our hunger—decadence divorced from suffering. Discarded Christmas trees are laid at the landfill’s edge like stacked bodies of a genocide, alternated stumps to stars— innocence drying out. 
 
**
 
No Boots for Arizona
 
but I must go. She called me near midnight, EST. I packed some heavy consequence a few lessons in grief. The internet has unbelievable pics of gold-pink and lonesome cumulous. She is a destination which needs no map, no GPS required. I could tell by her voice it was all westward horizons after blue mountains, blue grass. The only blue is the ink that rambles the contours. It all seems the same except for the cacti begging. I recall she said there would be three dusty arroyos on the left: Go far enough. Don’t question where you are, the men in those crusty towns wont know. I started early; it took too long. My anticipation felt guilty; in every mirage I saw a body to die for. The roads become less complicated, a few curves like nearing the end of an I-pad brain-teaser. A wand of second sunrise zipped through the slot canyon of hotel curtains, lit a Curtis photograph of Walpi, a Hopi village. I arrived in Flagstaff, unusually warm for evening, ponderosa, aspen, the train had come and gone, its bullion of history unloaded tar-smelling sleepers; gamblers with six shots at scoring. I hardly recognized her but I was her prayers answered like spirits down from the San Francisco Peaks, a vision perhaps, a cowboy smile Buddha could put on. The stars could not have been brighter, the moon was rolling on the tracks pissing itself out. We played poker and drank our joy sneaking into pockets of dark alleys. She showed me her art, gave me her penciled doodles: we’d buy boots tomorrow so I could kick them off before bed.
 
**
 
Stealing Away 
 
She sews patches on argument, places buttons along the edges like hubcaps, highway found and hung from barbed wire fences: a vengeance only the passing of miles can soften. He burns evening fields as if in anger, splashing flares across the cold winter sky. Starlings congregate, recite a subversive homily. Man and wife recede into complicated sleeps. At dream-break, he sneaks through night-fallen snow to let out the smell-spooked dogs, to free the chickens into the genius of their fox; goats that believe in a garden of delights somewhere else: she will not need the bother of them. Inside, she fabricates a pungent-hissing breakfast, hashes leftovers, bakes butter-soaked biscuits. Her monologue is peppered, with small forgivenesses, but apologies, like sheds, collapse now in storm. He ventures into no man’s land where tracks vanish without trace. Unchained, she slips back into the dust of a farmhouse hell; his last sigh escapes from the envelope she opens at the kitchen table.
 
**
 
Appearance at Everson’s Creek
 
Brian, the neighbour’s boy, found the body lounging by the swimming hole—no sign of struggle, no mark of pain, as peaceful as a stranger could be. Sheriff and deputy showed up with guns  and a betting humour, reluctantly poking the man as if there were danger in his lifelessness. No one admitted seeing the man around town though the boy’s mother turned her face to sob, fearing he would have nightmares for the rest of his life. The ambulance brought coloured carnival lights, the urgency of crackling radios, and the state police to make death official. The boy wanted the man to have a son who didn’t need him anymore: the zip of the body bag lengthening his spine.
 
**
 
Neighbours
 
One has sunken to his comfort level with wife number four, fifteen years younger. Across the street, Mr. Hernandez has filled-in his swimming pool to tend tomatoes and morning glories. Two doors down, dogs bark at the kids coming home from church as if at strangers. On Dogwood Lane, Mrs. Jane Dough bakes Jesus into every pastry, pie, every prayer. Her husband, Jack, of laughing stock, is proud to be a redneck in the post-pejorative sense. His sport is a cock-fighting humour. Over triple garages of the corner house, a copy-center banner droops--Don’t dump your damage on us--in snide black and white. Mr. Leo Nardo is offended, roars constantly, writes vituperative letters to the editor. Miss Jones, of woman’s college degree, talks in thread count using sterling vowels, maintains her green roof immaculately, but is horrified that trees suck her up each spring in their rebirth, sweet as she may be. Twyford James plays horseshoes with himself on moonless nights, his pitch lit by halogens that pollute the heavens. He forgets for a moment his son, a suicide. It’s a wonder that angels don’t hang out with us much anymore, giggling like silly teenagers, harmonizing with snippets of song, openly talking about sex. They don’t decorate urns or obelisks, advocate for remembrance much anymore.
 
**
 
Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps.  His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah. He is co-editor of poetry for Streetlight Magazine.