Beth Gordon
The Crone Weathers
Yellow rain: yellow sky: crows gather beneath the streetlight. Rowboats & washrags & boysenberry jam. A coven of black kittens atop the last phone booth in this town. A child carries her final wishes in a jelly jar like thunder. All that falls will sodden: mud champagne: mud violin: mud between my teeth. Sewers spellbound with murk & myth. Yearbooks & wasp nests & snake tongues all shred within the rising. Grandmothers look up from their kite strings: the wind screams like a man. Atonement is necessary no matter the flooded ambulances: no matter the dampened chimes. All that can open will open: window/egg/blackbird pie. All will share the story. Salvation in the lie. The truck engine still running while I ask for directions from angels swimming with barbed wire.
The Crone Tattooed
Now I find myself without the necessary language to explain her last breath. Numbers are also insufficient or inept. Charts + Graphs + Postcards. Paper mâché nests filled with paper mâché eggs filled with paper mâché yolk. It all amounts to nothing. Now I submit myself to the artist’s indelible ink. The needle that vibrates like a harmony of stars. The familiar scent of pain. Can I make of my body a mural? Can I make of my ribs a dispersements of daisies? An echo of clementines? A highway of thistle & thorns? Can I adorn my hollow-ed chest wall with a panorama of morning headlights as seen from 30,000 feet? If there are 8 exits on this plane & no exit from my body what choice but to become a canvas? I’ve redesigned my skin into a dragonfly metaphor. The scars are unimportant.
Unveiling
I cannot survive without electricity or running water or a temperature-controlled suburban home. I have never chopped firewood: never cradled a blade. Never carried a rifle into the fertile depths of a forest to kill something & name it food. I always grow squeamish at the sight of the hook inside the catfish’s gaping mouth. I hate merging into highway traffic. If I am trapped in the wreckage of a car: within that wreckage I will die. On the other hand: I can accessorize. A room. An interview dress. A person departing for Alaska. A family gathering. An empty tree. I can recite my children’s first words. Sock. What’s That? May I have some apple juice, please. I know that ghosts are real because how else can I explain every moment of my otherwise vanishing life. But that’s not really what we’re talking about, is it? I tend to digress when discussing my tenuous usefulness if the skies fill with bombs: the water with disease. The revelation may surprise me. If they need someone to pair a uniform with pearls: someone to select the new carpeting for a flooded mansion. I may stick around long enough to see how it all pretends to end. To see how everything blooms with fire & begins.
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, North Carolina. She is the author of several chapbooks including The Water Cycle (Variant Literature) and How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Twitter, Instagram, and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.
