Elephant

She’s placed herself, a drowned capsule,
inside your shadow box (cowarding)
Stuffed down
crouching and bent over like fallen leaves
in a storm drain

You eat her love
Uncured, unprocessed
Holy meat upon your shovel tongue
And did you get all you came here for?

She is an explanation of temperance
peppered with anxiety
You eat her, a monstrosity…
Full up
Carved out
the lining ripped from abysmal shreds of dignity
long gone

She remembers this dance in every body
one step forward,
two steps back
“That’s it”
“Take it again”
“Yeah”

Leave the money on the table
and the mess where it lands
She’s got her apron and broom on
It’s what she’s prepared to do
She’s porn for it

Endless
You will bite her
Break her
Call her despicable epithets
and she will not complain
Later, you will beat back her tears
Somewhere a hole in her esophagus
She will bleed
and she will tether herself inexplicably further to your
tyrannical wolves
And still, she will not complain
She will ache for another

Another useless name
Another pair of short shorts
Another sunset of smeared silver and black
and blue dripping
off her
like a muddied shower
Fungal
Somewhere, a hole in her heart

and still…
unable to recognize the girl that once stood in her stilettos
She will not complain
A sea of foamed-up thoughts will pass her by
in a wink
in a blink
like a flapping party banner that reads:

“Honey, I think there’s a problem here.”

Shadows


It began with a tree
It will end with a tree

This intangible belly with its roots exposed, giving into me
I stared into this infinitely armed, gentle beast with total abandon
Just a moment longer than the natural inclination to continue the path I’ve tread
Just long enough to hear her pulling me into a collapsed lean
Her whisper like a shout without words
Just a thought

“Listen”

When we give up these ghostly eyes, we will go into the trees
One breath at a time
Becoming the dusting and the dews of her echo
Hovering like the winds, we will giggle and wink at the dramas we have played out here
like blind children in their sand boxes

And on and on and on it goes
Our dance
In one body after the next
In one corpse after and so on…willingly
No matter the cost or all that has come before

None of us will be able to account for when and how it will come to an end
(These bodies)
When we will dance our last

We are shadows
Though we creep and crawl entombed in flesh and bone thoughts
Busy with securing elusive immortality
I imagine such shadows will retreat when there are no branches left to bear our fruits
Then we will see if our Great Mother will give us a different kind of legs to go on gathering

(copyright by Chana Ylahne Orr 2010)