Super-Sized Series

 Transformation Part 1

 

 

That’s not my Survivor, I tell the Animal Whisperer by Sharon Waller Knutson

The cat in the photo on his phone
resembles a plush stuffed animal 
with a bright orange coat,
a fluffy white beard and booties
and a white streak on his nose.
and the tip of his tail.

My Survivor is a tiger striped
tabby with a scruffy coat 
from scrounging for birds 
and rats in the heat and cold.
My husband feeds the feral feline.
But he will only eat raw meat.
When my husband leaves earth
I can’t take care of the tabby.

“That’s the same cat I rescued 
from your property,” says the sixty
something big man squinting
like he did when he hauled
away a squalling Survivor
out to his car and held him 
on his lap as his wife
drove the 3 ½ miles to town 
on the bumpy dirt road.

“Survivor has his own apartment 
and two meals a day of salmon
and sardines as well as wet
and dry cat food,” he reports.
“He’s so heavy I can’t lift him,” 
he says. Still I cannot
find the scrawny skinny 
Survivor in this fat cat.

I worry Survivor is dead 
or roaming and might turn
up again starving and scratching 
on my glass. Then in our photos, 
I see a flash of white on orange.

But what convinces me
is when he meows 
and does the Dippity Do Da dance  
when he sees me. 
“That’s My Survivor,” I say.


Anna Christina by Terri Kirby Erickson

After Andrew Wyeth’s “Anna Christina,” 1967

They could sit for hours without the need
for words in the ancient rooms of the Olson 
house with its crumbling plaster, peeling 
wallpaper, and layer after layer of dust and 
soot. Here, Christina lived with her brother, 
Al, a landlocked sailor who yearned for the 

sea he left behind to manage his father’s farm. 
She could not walk but refused a wheelchair,
preferring to pull her body across the floor 
with sticklike arms. But Wyeth did not judge 

them. Alvaro was as much a part of the New 
England landscape as the rocks, the hills. And 
his sister was a monument to self-reliance, 
an icon, a queen. So Wyeth painted his friend’s 
face with all its crags and hollows, her stern 

and unwavering gaze, the lidless eyes that stare
at the viewer with such defiance, as if daring 
people to pity her unkempt hair that falls like 
splintering timbers to her shoulders, her faded

dress the color of moss and mold, her useless 
legs that dangle off-panel like the limbs of 
a marionette. But she was still a formidable 
woman, carved from the stone of her ancestors. 
Wyeth would not insult her with lies, mixed his 
medium with yolks, water, pigment, and truth.


Chrysalis by Tamara Madison
 
Newly freed from high school
my daughter spends her evenings
alone in the living room 
with Grey’s Anatomy. Life 
is so different now, classes 
at odd times, friends scattered 
like jacks. Opaque as ever, 
a deep well, she rests on the sofa 
in blue TV light. I can almost see 
her wings developing, intricate, 
folded like an origami moth 
within her close cocoon.


Then by Lynn White

She’s standing still 
pale as England, 
slim and serious
as I stood 
then.
Hair chopped 
above her shoulders
with a little curl allowed
as mine was 
then.
A little curl allowed,
in memory of it’s ringlets
earlier than
then.
Then it grew longer 
and we pulled it straight.
So now, it’s more like it was 
before then.
Before then, 
when
it was longer still,
and ironed straight
under thick brown paper.
It had been shorter still before
then
it’s feminine length curtailed, but
with a little curl allowed,
a reminder of it’s ringlets earlier than
then.
Of it’s earlier hated ringlets
grown  from loose curls.
Ringlets cut 
when 
father died.
Not until
then.

First published in Silver Birch Press, Looks Like Me series December 2015


A Champagne Headscarf by Abha Das Sarma
 
succeeds thirty years
of my white-
beads set in silver,
the colours
rose, black and turquoise-
oh, the danglers I so loved
help me fight.
 
Now when the dreams combine,
the window besides
shines the sun inside, a flight
to my rooftop holds the time-
a kite high on the coconut tree,
yellow bunting on a mango branch tip
and the squirrel carving its path in between. 


All the Names I’d Like to Give Myself by Arlene Levine
 
Call me what you will
but I have names for myself
wishes of who I want to be
dreams of an open face dancing whole person
able to take the heat
Call me Luna, call me Sol
I’ll answer to either or both
because they are me in its entirety
Call me resilient ground cover, murky tide pool,
encouraging firmament, fiery diadem
spinner and spun in the cosmic maze
There is always a world for me, of me, by me
from the words I chose, from the singing
syllables of sound strung together into thought
I imagine myself: a velvet rain forest
in the Amazon at dawn with a dozen squawking
lime-sherbet parrots dining on mango flesh
ripe as the morning
Call me crazy, call me shadow, call me
the beginning of an idea stirring
on the tip of your medulla oblongata
as succulent as fresh bee whiskey
capable of stinging senses
jolting the overgrown glade of your
sleepy life back into existence
Call me what you will

Transformation by j.lewis
 
when dreams are better
than waking to a day
where every task
is a nightmare
when those who know you
know you not at all
and loneliness multiples
with every person
who crowds around
crying save me -
there is a single answer:
cocoon
 
i watched your focused feedings
saw your depression devour
everything green
until all you thought good was gone
the lines you wrote
wrapped around you
thicker, harder
you escaped
inside your poetry
 
i waited
and i watched
 
emergence has its price
demands remolding of mind and body
old forms and feelings abandoned
as you climb up into sunlight
fan blue-gold wings uncertainly
then fly
free from past notions
of who and what you are
finally aware
of the beauty you bring
to those who sit quietly waiting
 

The Oracle Speaks by Gary D. Grossman

At the back of the thrift store a clerk is feather dusting a Magic Eight Ball. With the fourth swish over this 20th century party prophet, a pop-up squall sweeps me back to 1972 and LA, couched in Jules living room, her parents weekending at their Malibu beach house. Linda, her sister, stands and cools in front of the open refrigerator in black lace panties and bra. She asks is there any pie left, I could eat a horse? Her blood sugar at ebb tide, an aftereffect of the three bowls of Cambodian weed we’ve just finished smoking. Jules brings out her Magic Eight Ball, our Pythia of Delphi, with its score of foretellings ranging from: reply hazy, without a doubt, to simply, NO. It is our Einstein when befuddled and baked, and I am befuddled on whether to transfer to university at Berkeley, leaving Jules, the current owner of my heart, behind. I query, shake the Eight Ball, turn it over, only to read a definitive NO.  The left and right corners of Jules mouth slowly slide upwards. Facing the girls I say The last time I used the Eight Ball, it told me not to go to college. And bang, like a power line transformer exploding in Georgia's August heat, I rematerialize in the store, shake my head left and right to clear it from my thirty-year old abandonment of Jules and the oracle, and then recall the Wednesday in 1987 when I was granted tenure at the university down the street. 
 
From Objects in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear


Peter Pan by Rose Mary Boehm

It was after he set the CEO’s hair on fire
when he was ‘let go’ for the first time.

He'd wanted to stay forever young,
but slowly the surgery failed
and he was going south in a big way.
He knew why he’d been so reluctant
to leave Never-Never. 

Wendy broadened at the hips and needed
glasses. Her hearing wasn’t so hot anymore.
She got a bit upset when he took up
with the fairies. He knew his particular
game was up when even they giggled
behind those busy hands which fluttered
like large butterfly wings. And they whispered.

So he looked among the mothballs for his
suit, but he’d forgotten how
to fly. When he got to the place, the hinges
had rusted and nobody was in.

from DO OCEAN’ HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS


Illuminated  Places  by Martha Ellen

The night she died 
I had a dream.
I saw her walking 
in a pleasant landscape
on an uphill footpath
toward an illuminated place.
Her back was to me.
She turned and saw me 
watching her leave 
for the last time.

Thrilled to see me,
she smiled and
waved with the familiar 
excited anticipation 
I had seen so many times 
before when I arrived
at her sheltered home
and we would go for coffee.
There were days I thought
this a chore, a boring task
that subtracted
from my important life.
But, in that moment, 
in her joyful smile, clarity.
She knew I feared 
to carry on without her.
“You will be OK. 
I will wait here for you.”

Everyone had believed
I was the stronger sister.


Transformation by Rachael Ikins

I worried as the paper stack grew, all the faces with earnest instructions while my mind lifted off like a helicopter. Bewildered. Home in 24 hrs. Glued, taped, stapled and stitched.


Paper doll. 
Art project? 

He said it was “really bad in there” 
that he was glad I let him in,
him and the glue gun, the saw, titanium and plastic. Did he invite the robot after all. 

He reminds me of a teddy bear for all the brutality of what surgeons do, there is softness 

After all the thousands of instructions, 
white noise, at home 

I remember who I am. 
Pain another word for fear 
drains away, just one night. 

Today I let the dogs out. 
Step in my garden 
we watch the sun rise. 

not the same woman who limped
out of the house last Friday morning,
nothing stays the same does it? 

I wish he  had given me the pieces 
a decorative urn to bury in the garden 

what carried me
so far, so long until it wore 
its own heart out. 


Coming Out of Retirement, Age 70 by Joe Cottonwood

A milestone 
like re-losing my virginity 
as I crawl under a deck
among spore-puffing dirt, 
as duff prickles my navel 
as I jack up a beam, then pound and pry 
with unsure muscles to remove a rotten post, 
install another, then lower the jack again. 

Humping toward me over curling fern, 
a wooly bear caterpillar who knows inborn 
of construction, of transformation, 
who seems to say —

Welcome back to funky earth, 
to sawdust in nostrils, 
to splinters under fingernails, 
to blood-seeping scratches 
discovered in the shower. 

Welcome back to a world 
built better by your body.

Verse-Virtual 


Biscuit Love by Joan Leotta

Biscuits transubstantiate 
from buttermilk, Lily brand flour, 
Clabber Girl baking powder
into a heavenly delight.
First food passed
following prandial prayer
communion of love 
between baker and diner.

Plucking one, still warm
from the colored woven basket,
my fingers tingle.

Slowly I separate a
lightly crisp top half
from soft layers below 
on this bread of perfection.
Then tamp down a pat of 
real butter, swirl honey 
on each cloud-like half.
I sample, slowly, 
savor honey's thick
sweetness aided, 
indeed, abetted by the salty, 
creamy, butter beneath,
let my tongue capture each
tender biscuit crumb.
Edible perfection.

In a slightly different form it was selected for the Poetry in Public Places a few years ago in North Carolina and appeared on posters all over Winston Salem.