Poetry Magazine, Richelle Hawks, June 2001

Poetry Magazine

Richelle Hawks

USA

How the Bones Grow

Our loaded bone is the mandible.

Its childhood was a drain
for sharp-shooting chlorine,
chalk of bad apples,
a longing to be wrapped in gauze.

Apples equal loss,
Chlorine is unearthly (think:
blue-green, some bright day floating)
The gauze is forgotten.

Our beloved bone is the sacrum.

It is an ancient moat grazing
lost continents,
dead languages; it finds
others like itself. Waiting.

Like other bones, it joins a cult.
Flashlights are provided
for shadow-making, the deep
rabbits, swirling owls, shame.

Our white bone is the sternum.

All the other planets attach here,
93 million miles from the sun.
Blood is turned away: flash of
roadblocks, men propped by signs,

detour. It is a highway.
In 5000 years, the whiteness
will fall, unwrap itself.
New bones will live, dark sticks.

I Dream Beamships Equal Love

The Florida coastline is sinking,
its breath a famous conch shell, seeks
the rusty swing-sets of its past.
It takes out an ad in the Miami Herald.

The rest-stop could not understand
Why I began ovulating Polaroid's
of Vulcan-earred Asket from Timars.
Even the highway produced a conspiracy,

which I carried like a bottle of Sangria
to Billy Meier's birthday extravaganza.

We all sat on the lawn spitting out orange
rinds, and pointing to his trees.
"One was in falling-leaf trajectory
right there, remember?" He remembered.

He was amazed to learn his name
was mentioned in the ad.
He looked like Santa, the blinking
lights of his beard.

He could not understand Spanish,
but he smiled and nodded.
He was so full of birthday cake.

When he arrived in Florida,
he became judgmental of its palms.
Now, he refuses to believe
William Burroughs died in Kansas.

The lights of his beard never lie.
"Billy," they whisper, "Kansas"

What the Morning Gave Her

There is a clove-smoked woman
rinsing rocks from her hair,
rocks are what the morning gave her.

The afternoon zinged her thighs
with its question mark, an entire concert,
inside the music a river divided,
grief grows wild hair

below, her thighs are anchors humming
a night song, caked with constellation
of mild arrows dotted
by townspeople, a kite-shape
of them to devil the land with,

not her land, but a man's land,
a flatness, another kite-shape of herself
to carry, a landing pad
for the townspeople,
for what the man gave her.

They helicopter down,
onto the clove-smoked woman,
she appears in flickers,

her braids wave them in,
how her gingham glistens,
in the brightest morning star