Barbra Nightingale

​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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.