New girl

A broken bottle

a discarded hairbrush

totems within totems

effigies of past and present

a light knock on the door

she’s wearing a French halter dress

her ankles are slim like my mother’s

she’s not my mother

her skin is brown like my mother’s

she’s not my mother

her black hair is curled like my mother’s

she’s not my mother

her perfume speaks of wanting passion

it belies the faux expression on her face

attempting trickery

she bends to me and pretends to be enchanted

by childhood photos

they are not her photos to touch

with her careful, manicured pink nails

a color my mother always hated

she had more style in her little finger

the one with dupuytren’s contracture

more a question mark than deformity

it didn’t stop her playing the piano

carving her place in my father’s heart

and this imposter? Flicking her way into our life

like a cheap fan you buy, because you are sweating

I want to tell her, using grown up words

I may be six, but I know what she’s up to

with her shifting glances toward my handsome father

with her endearing crossing of espadrilled feet

if she touches my mother’s hairbrush

I will burn

this happy house down

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Thoughts in light

She has written herself off

or so she says

watching youth inherit the mantle

she stares at her own flaccid chest

in unforgiving morning sun

and tries to convince herself to gently let go

light pouring in through the bay window

creating a halo effect in surround

she is bathed in unexpected warmth

her pores absorbing hungrily

that urging intensity, a happy blindness

as if the world paused in its toil

to tap her on the shoulder and whisper

it’s not near over yet girl

go out, gather your arms full

live

live

live!

Notes of a common waiting room

The woman with one breast is friendly
She jokes about feeling lighter
We nod grimly

Gallows humor
Palpable energy shift from 20 year old gamer wearing graffiti hi-tops, and 60 year old with deflation in her eyes
The ravage of time and effect, painted on women of different shapes, scars like badges of honor except when they’re not

The old lady is marked by a blue gown to our uniform pink
She exudes weariment without lifting her head from its downcast slump
Her limbs look like they have been pickled and left in hot Texan sun
She has an old ring on her wedding finger
I want to say something
But the lump in my throat and her shuttered aspect stay my hand

Instead I nod to the New Yorker and tell her there’s a free seat
Nobody really wants to sit

They want to run
Be anywhere else
Anyone else
“I miss the days they just told you that you could go“
Says the tall woman with a burgundy hair band
The woman cooked in black garb might belong to a cult
She had an accent and glowers

She says she drove from Eagle Pass because they don’t have good medicine there

Simmering rage in her balled lacquered fists
The hiss of some impossibly expensive machine out of sight

everyone meets eyes over masks, the unsaid being
Is this good medicine?

We play occidental musical chairs

The magazines are gone because of the virus, we hide our faces behind our fabric hoping for modesty that has long fled

Nurses walk their daily steps in the shiny lino corridor, their hair gleams like peacock feathers, they are harried but kind eyed

I get a young woman tech who has quiet jazz
She talks of wanting children. Her brother is sterile. She’s afraid to get tested.

I urge her to try. Thinking of how not long ago I stood in her slightly less comfortable shoes
Imaging a future

How they unfurl and then dry up and close, ready for the rush hour drive back
Mascara lines running like train tracks on masks of horror

A scrawny woman with platinum hair asked me how to do something on her phone
etiquette is said to save us
Not in the time of Covid, I think

A high school had blossomed in the pit of the waiting room
Some have been here two hours
They divide solemnly into temporary allegiances
Some like the loud mouth
Others roll at the waiting and click their dry tongues
It reminds me of paper flowers put in water

Her grandchildren are visiting. The mute girl in the corner looks young enough to be one

I ache for her fledgling fear
Knowing

None of us are safe
From the words
“Come and discuss your findings with the specialist“

Conveyer belt love

Conveyer belt love

You nearly ruined me

In the shallows, near the swamp

Where if it didn’t work out?

You dumped and moved on

What a horrible way to live

Nothing redeeming, nothing eternal

I was told; you’re born three centuries too late

For nowadays people are impatient and demanding

They throw away more than they earn

We’re The Plastic Generation … hell we’ll be buried in plastic urns

In this fettered landscape, it’s no easy thing to find

Something left beating, whole and strong.

Conveyer belt love began to make sense

A logical response to an unfeeling era

Where being let down could be replaced by a clone

If you are lonely, buy yourself a Japanese doll

When you are sad, blow something up, or put batteries in

TV for the masses, turn on, tune out, get an i-phone

Be tracked by faux Politicians and told how to vote

Go to sleep with unconscious messages trying to sell you more

Who cares about love, it’s a sham, a fait accompli, an overgrown child

All notions thrown out, along with 24/7 Porn

Your husband is jacking off as you think you’re meeting for your anniversary brunch

Your wife is screwing your boss, even the dog doesn’t love you, it’s all programming

Pavlov will surely tell you that and what about Skinner and his box?

Aren’t we all lab rats in fancy colored clothes?

Maybe the thing to do is join in and stop wanting real

Because real hurts when it turns out to be false

And plastic outlasts us, polluting the oceans it stands sinful testimony

On the beaches in India you find Starbucks straws and CocaCola bottles

We’re international now, the big conglomerates boast.

Conveyer belt love

You nearly ruined me

In the shallows, near the swamp

Still I think about ideals once in a while and imagine

What if, it were all different and we found our way back?

Would Cathy let in Heathcliff? Would Anna Karenina still jump?

And Diane Keaton in Ms Soffel? Would anyone be alive to understand?

Why we lived once for love and it meant the world

Even as it was so often an empty house of cards

What if

We got the Queen of Hearts?

Below zero

Snow I have always

been thankful for your expunging

whiteout

how you take dirt

and suffocate it

beneath insistent layers

the wild and untame methods of your

settling, blown like befuddled

birds in all direction, swirling in

lost echo, falling eventually to

sugar-coat the dim world brighter

as pipes fail, their fragile egg shells

bloated with trapped water

a parallel I think

to our own shuttered lives

When I was a child I would

be told

do not go out in the snow for long

you will catch your death

and I hoped

very much

that were true

for to sleep

a red rose in bosom of white

I could fancy in my child’s mind

no greater perishment

though fancy and its

myriad ways of suggesting

death

grow less appealing

the older we get

Now I avoid slipping on ice

for fear of crushing my elbow into

shards like my father did

I see in the distance

my grandmother’s dog

he is trying to eat snow flakes

and puzzled when they melt

barks into whiskering storm

I think he speaks for us all

in this grand illusion

half wanting to be

taken off by encompassing whorls

carried to ice palace

where surely the meaning of

everything can be found

along with my mittens I lost

in tenth grade

stooping down to place

the cherry in

my snow robins

breast

Distorted from downpour

Without you there, rubbing against my emptiness

I am a scream

begun without end

I may close my mouth

I may purse my lips and paint them

I may say yes please and thank you very much

and still dial your number

that no longer exists

just to hear it ring

in my mind

once

twice

three times

it may be you

on the other end

picking up, I can hear the lint

of the connection stretching like walkers on wire

a crackle, a fizz, the ghosting hiss of you

what are you saying?

Rolling down bled city streets with lights

hanging like old bottles, catching stray saline

I strain to hear

through ceaseless whiteout of rain

it is yellow against brown glass

distorted from downpour

slapping wetly in time to lost rhythm

pirate radio in storm, trying to reach land

crackle, fizz, pop, static … spreading her fingers

we danced on these steps

in our best clothes

with bare feet growing dirty

and it was then

as you spun hotly beneath your wool coat and laughed

your iris neck bent in grace

as elegant a thing I ever saw

dissolving through time into ushered coffin

we are still

on the phone trading jokes

switching out rolling papers with blackened tongues

I hear you sigh

as reedy and deep as mislaid wine

tap your cheap hoop earring against the line

hello? Hello? What’s that you say?

Now that you are out of the box

I think I shall remain within

for it is easier to sleep by these four corners

of memory

than try in unremitting rain

to go on without you

Pale skinned mixed-race

What they see

when they do not see

anything but the cloth over bones

its hue and texture

I won’t be given a chance to illustrate

whether I possess the kinetic DNA within my manifestation

for it matters not

to anyone, you are holding within you

a rainbow, when the color you inhabit

through lottery and variance

dissuades them from believing

you are anything but

that plain, dreary composite of the conquer

able to get a seat at North-side restaurants

while others are told; sorry we’re taking bookings

for next week

in that experience there lies a divide

sometimes between siblings, one fair, one keening

toward onyx

while I observe the differentiation

like the whet of a sharp knife carving out marrow

I would ask

do not make the mistakes your subjugators revelled in

invite your sisters of a lighter hue

sometimes we sit here watching you

braid your hair and soak up the sun

wanting so much to be part of

what our DNA says we are

Immutabilité – Candice Louisa Daquin — FREE VERSE REVOLUTION

In the afterlife There is always something to do pick up the leaning umbrella before it hits the window, leaving a tell tale smudge clutter. Le désordre le bruit, le fatras, a manic for the mind seeking calm in Upton’s Jungle where only heat bakes rocks inedible cushions flattened by visitations, last nights vestige reminds […]

Immutabilité – Candice Louisa Daquin — FREE VERSE REVOLUTION

Heed

I resent

No, I am angry

It is my regret that

You steal my thoughts

every day

even as you do not really

exist

damn

you.

Is it my wield to wake and smell the coming

of Autumn, her combed wild intruding on Summer’s

last heady retreat

and with her, all the memories of us

tumbling like leaves of every color.

You are a shade of me I cannot forget, nor

am I able to extricate your taste from my soul

as if you were the darkest liquor and I, the thirsting

sinner.

We do not know one another, yet in this russet world

where people step out with reddened cheeks and think of

night as a place to venture deep and become lost in

the reflecting faces of glasses brought together

I recognize in you, someone I need.

It is foolish then, that you will never know this,

as time reveals a betrayal, thick in coming like smoke

from a burned pyre

I see you there, in the crowd of onlookers, your

shoulders thin in a cardigan, eyes dark against

flames, a smile on your face as if

without my saying you knew

it was my heart that burned with longing

and your hands

putting out the fire

with the coldness

of disregard.

You steal my thoughts every day

as if, possessed of confidence that all should

fall at your knees, you hold the world and its

caprices in your little flowering hand

sometimes I want to ask; How did you become

so fat on yourself? Who gave you that belief

you were worthy? And bitterness might add;

I am better than this, better than you,

not someone used to, or wanting to remain

subject. Inhaling your sugar pill …

Instead I say nothing and spells

boil off like alcohol leaving nothing but

clear water, I plunge into and try to

forget the nagging impulse to find ways of altering

your hooded intractability.

I live in the crossword puzzle of your

eyes, the bewitchment of your fruiting mouth

as you open your lips and speak, drowned

out by time and distance

I think nevertheless

I hear.

You steal my thoughts

every day

I once wore self-belief like a rosary

around my wrists and counted every

subject. You took on the role as if

those clothes had been yours all

along and I had been carved from

the wood of your ancestors tree

some type of mango tree or

something as bright and hungering

as your skin when sunlight bathes

your full cheeks and I forget how

to swallow. Our fates are written

in secret alcoves we may never find

the chapter, until it is upon us and

falling in line, we play out our part

in this incantation you master me

because you feel nothing and no

words I possess will fill that

empty place and fetch from it

an urge to dive with me

into the wet of my angry tears

perhaps this is karma

it could however,

be just, a passing cruelty

like so many other things

forgotten by those, who do not stop

long enough, to

pay heed.

The fixation & the vexation

Sometimes there is an unbuckling of

temper and fear and loathing

mixed into indigo and strewn

in furied air

we pick it up as

a smell long forgotten

taps long dormant senses

and despite the years, regain

a moment mislaid

your arms doused with powder

glittering like another being, turning,

you, spectral and otherworldly

an afterglow of fiesta, a street

littered with signs of party goers

their tossed colors, a mélange of remembrance

we grind and mash and rearrange

clothes strewn in multi color love letters

on unpolished floor

seeking to find in electrified connection

that dizzying light

buoying briefly from surface

telling of depths few venture

where usually we rest, bobbing and sailing

absent of passion, thinking like the face of a clock

about slow steady movement, predictable pauses

spasms only in the imagination

or when a familiar song stirs a disquiet

whilst below, in regions beneath our reach

gained access through mutual need

briefly like the flick of a match

sets sulphur stalking cold corridors

only there, unbeknownst to the world

and her grave tick-tock visage

we earn closer, sloughing skin, molecules

separating individuals, ages, castles, skies

until on the windswept summit we fall

clutching each other in entreaty and relief

fading from sight, resisting wholeness

becoming starlight

only then, your damp hand caught

somewhere inside me, my bruised

lips smarting with the pressure of

cascading into earths center

do we know a place that is only ours

where we are pre-Denisovan and

holy, beneath the candle of a human’s

little watched life

that shallow wick, curved in entreaty

for meaning, for Gods, for monsters

and your rounding stomach, wet with tears

salt and oxygen and loss like a tableau

of everything, a table set for two

we sit obedient and fatigued

the lines of us, drawn before we arrive

breaking outside the cast, little cracks

small fizzures

with the fixation and vexation

of mortal love.