phototropism
Your grey eyes cut around the room,
following light as if movement or prey,
dashing in and under growth,
gathering places otherwise unseen
into your periphery.
Another body away lies a world
longing for you to silently explore
another silhouette without fear.
To hold nothing without reverence
nothing to do with antiquity, nothing about today,
no, leave her be.
The shadow of judgmental gaze is my own
and I imagine in yours I am a woman.
I am grown, I am the role
I am space and I am the mold.
Ceremonies of dignity, spinal extension, this light
pulling out of light acts almost how
every breath retreats into authenticity.
Eyes resume their wandering path, lids closed
this time. Sleep is something like euthanasia,
if only voluntary,
temporarily
relinquishing consciousness.
portrait of a farmworker
The romantic farmer can be no more.
Even as wire and nail cling to the alien landscape
begging for one more straw-hat portrait,
there will be no more faces to obstruct from view.
We find no shade in the sun
but take refuge in the space between aggregates,
sites of water retention, aerobic respiration, potential re-creation.
We forgot the names of the flowers all bramble
and burnt twig. We never bothered to classify
the weeds, we recognize the value of a dollar.
The need to eat.
And that does not mean we were not moved
to imagine our bodies fitting into the wooden frame,
that we did not cry out in our last attempt
to squeeze like cellophane apples, individually wrapped, easily bruised, perishable—
into mutated models from matriarchal memory.
There is no relief from oblivion.
The fact of the matter is that all colored images will fade
that exposure to light expediates the process
that even in the dark they will deteriorate.
Sam
Ask any farmer, when a rooster dies,
the next in line grows twice his size.
I recall this fact two days after
my brother’s relapse when my grandfather
calls just a reminder
I’ve made him proud.
No mourning dress, casket parade, falling
asleep at the wheel of the toyota hearse.
He is not dead yet, but kept at
a loving distance—
a place we call rehab.
We go hunting every other dream like astral cats,
dragging dead animals back to the house.
epistolary for a girl I knew
In the season before black-eyed susans
there were lily of the valley littering the
stony creek grassy marshfields
where we stomped and waded through brackish waters
where we believed nature was uniform that
your birthday would always follow mine
There are snake tracks
under the cul-de-sac house and
a dog named Joscie out back
A tree growing feathers for leaves
slipping through our fingers and
our knuckles release,
I knew you wanted to hurt.
But I will never find a reason to drive
down that dead end
remember
how you held a purple sharpie
that night your father broke
down at the feet of divorce
Or how you proofread
your mother’s email to him
The same girl who took sadistic pleasure
in the suicide of her Sims
My black hole star sting
Broken bead string
Half dead something
Song she likes to sing
I’ve nearly forgotten the bend
in willow tree limb
how I called after you
higher Lily higher
you’ll find his happiness
hanging from the guise
of the next branch
*
Flash tattoo
Self-defense
Suddenly psychic
Old friends
Militant chaos
Negligence
sleep paralysis
coercion lifts like hot clouds
oxygenated embers against the frozen body,
palms open to receive stillness,
surrender
at dawn the electric-pulsing-telegraph-machine
taps a morse message, rhythmic blurred text
alerting to some kind of trouble:
you’re being tracked
so long as you’re my energetic fixation,
we’ll never get a good night’s sleep.
all this forbidden fruit sequestered in
wet gardens and wildflower fields
now reposing beside your bed,
where I let my guard down and
where you shed your scales.
The shrill apparatus shrieking
I’m to blame for all the restless nights in
your Bloodhound mind.
dial tone drip
faucet click
How easy, every night,
she closes her eyes.
*****
Sharon Webster is a poet and educator based in New York City.