Sway, Mojave
Coyotes, rest your paws.
I am your friend,
Plodding down
the desiccated,
labyrinthine U.S. Southwest,
Hugging cacti,
Searching for
Nothing.
Watch me dance and splay and splatter
Amid the unifying haze
Of a peyote sky and soothsayer and
Hear how Dylans and Baezs and Joplins rumble to the ground
That is cracked by the earth’s desperate inhales.
The sun stretches its bruised wings around its pricking nest.
The black vulture understands me.
We sniff-in the sweet of throbbing entrails,
with its delicate blued and greened roots.
I squawk. I claw.
I dive from the bone-perch of this Joshua Tree.
The searing sky beats my eyes blind.
My tears lick them clean.
My beak is slick and nacreous.
My plumage, an obsidian liquid.
Sipping, gliding. My eyes are on
The burning froth of coyote.
Shelling the Earth
The sea springs dust.
Shadowy breaths from mountain tops are
Halos for the herrings.
And we are halos for the birds.
Our bodies are tree-ringed
And left for shifty fingers to smooth and pry.
Pinched faces look tearlessly at family black-and-whites, where
The colors were distilled in exchange for a saturated life of light.
Once upon a time, untimed and unknown to you or I,
Candied apples rotted in baskets alongside
The warm bodies of children sleeping in the noontime.
Carapaces and care packages washed ashore for the puckered eyes encased in sundried skin
To examine.
And these women planted their gatherings in a garden of graves,
Grains of granite were adorned in sweet meat and flesh.
The ground broke.
The trees bent their branches to brace the sky, like a blind child’s hand grasping for mama.
Scheherazade-length scrolls of stories have been webbed
To explain the rope of tubers that reached into the ocean
And plumbed the belly of the earth
Jerking the world for a hair of a second,
And stilling it for an even thinner hair
So that sea became soil, and soil, sea.
Raised Ribs
How does one eat a rib? How does one eat a rib like a lady?
That and other things that mama hadn’t mentioned.
While the other girls were off to athletic and academic practices, I was being glazed by the glare
of the TV screen. But even more so, I watched you and loved you to a degree unrequited,
mama.
To eat a rib like a lady, to soak in its southern deliciousness, in the hands of a meek young girl in
this city for all time, not dripping but dried like the bare bones of the truth you smirked at last
night. A truth that I laced in BBQ paste to keep your lips from slanting, proving how much of a
mess I really am and how much of one I can make.
I laid out the truth bare as a funnel of arctic wind. And you awoke the next day as if bathed in
Lethe. Free.
I’ve been told in rooms of stringent fluorescence another arctic wind, that I’m out of his rib.
How selfish of you— I want it all, and I want it from you.
My back measures my years by fear, marking my essence’s contractions and the unwanted
promise of one explosion (but out of what?)
My essence has fought thought. Unwavering in its want of being, for Existence in any possible
World.
My hand droops and harnesses an invisible computer’s mouse, endlessly. Physical activity
enervates me. My back, my map, it curves in what would be elegant for a swan but for this
human form beckons the elderly woman who I hope looks up stooped yet charmingly at me this
moment.
She who will have taught her only daughter how to eat ribs fit for armies. Including the rib
dispensable for him but most fertile for us. Who told her daughter:
“Darling, the only way to eat a rib is with proper hunger for the last vestige of juice. Incarnation.”
About the Poet:
Stephanie Lamberson resides in Brooklyn reluctantly-she’d rather be gadding about the U.S. Southwest. Urged by her heart’s beating chant of “write it all down,” she scrawls on post-its, writing pads, and cigarette cartons. She primarily writes poems, which arm her in daily wrestles with solipsism. She will enter an MFA in Poetry program next year.
