Poetry |

from “Prisoner’s Cinema”

from Prisoner’s Cinema

 

in extremis   I was

a figure on a path.

A stranger recruited from an eave

 

at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, I held

a styrofoam cup of instant coffee

and my dog-eared volume of Common Prayer.

 

Called out by a circle of children

huddled over a baby rattler

 

with percussive up-rush the sudden

flight of mice to the Mesquite.

 

 

Their keeper, a blowsy girl in Princess Leia buns

swooned on the arm of her bigamist — both amply dosed

on creosote vapor

 

the plunge of her dress revealed

breasts, sorely wealed

 

and the site consumed me — as the chili plucks

the bud — did this girl arouse

such stutters in my function.

 

 

Stripped down to the greaves, I strode

into the weedy field behind the Men’s

and there emerged the one called “Mouth”

 

obstreperous little devil

squat and stacked as a Swiss army knife.

 

I asked  “What do you stand for, Mouth?

Objectionable reliquary of living matter.”

 

 

Next thing I know we’re wounding the poppy

for an ooze of its milky sap

 

made banquet of opioid, watercress, wormwood …

 

Could have been a week that passed

or several minutes.

 

*

 

The Mouth unleashed his coated tongue, wad of sweet gum,

scant hair from a black-tailed deer—

such pharmacopic sorcery was never seen.

 

Seized in an orgiastic rear

at the knee of the next world

several visions commenced:

 

-A woman stalled at the threshold with a ripe plum.

 

-Scrap of scarlet flagging on the nuptial bed.

 

And this vision of Finisia

fashioning for the wood stove a “shit burrito”

from newspaper and digestion’s bounty.

 

Lucid dream this

seems so lifelike

 

my mild pastoral hope
grown timorous.

 

Wake me when my quaking’s done.

 

*

 

I had a jackal in my genus.

I moved among branches, nimbly.

 

Rose to my feet in the Pleistocene

to fulfill the human schematic

 

of hair, backbone, milk production,

musculature and motion of limbs.

 

 

Now, in a glitz of newly minted quarters,

in the tobacco-stained chintz of the drapery

 

a pearl-handled switch

taps the glass

 come out, come out, and admit the blade.

 

Now’s the day I pay the piper.

Now’s the plague of sulfured egg.

 

*

 

In order to test the tensile strength of the resource chain

(otherwise known as “the others among us”)

 

we tilled an unnatural row, sewed a house-broken seed

and there sprouted the singularity.

 

Blight latched the new buds.

Peril unwound in strangling vines.

 

My mother called it widowmaker,

the blackened snag that forked my sight

and hatched the spore that mapped this

archipelago of blood into my handkerchief.

 

 

I long to live again

in the murmur of larvae

bioluminescence

in dentrical arms of radiolarian.

 

An ordinary being should be consecrated.

 

 

*

 

 

Through pressure, vertiginous momentum

(as pottery is turned on a wheel)

my Lord forms me.

 

Was it His hands that shaped the charismatic megafauna

and rendered cryptic the Phylliidae?

 

I tied my rag to the branch to pacify His ghost

but the boughs interlaced and the canopy closed.

 

Subsisting, now, on the dark understory.

 

It might be interesting to see what I look like.

But I can never get into that shaft of light

 that creeps in this cave, because the people

block my way —

 

Bored a wound, in time,

into the cleanly carved escarpment

for I wanted to sleep off the dream, Lord,

 

admit no more

fear into my temple.

 

I should have been a better friend to myself.

 

*    *   *   *

 

The italicized text in the final section is quoted from The Divided Self by R. D. Laing (the testimony of “Joan”).

Contributor
Lisa Wells

Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer from Portland, Oregon. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix (2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. A new book of nonfiction is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2020. She lives in Seattle.

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