By: Wendy E. Braun
The taste in the cotton folds
of the pillowcase,
damp drool stained
scent of unwashed hair and sweat.
A cry for something,
someone or maybe
just the high hopeless notes
that fall in alleys
like trees in that empty forest,
ripples of a voice
that can’t be placed…
Only the weight of it,
like an old tin soldier,
whose red paint is
chipping in your hands.
Thank you for checking in on my poetry over the last few months. It has been so nice to see that I have not been forgotten. I have been very busy working on a manuscript which, along with other projects, became my sole focus. Thankfully, now that I have completed those goals, I can now get back to offering up some of my poetry and prose again.
Once more, thank you for dropping in, it warms my heart.
Sometimes the modernity of things surprises me. As if I fell into this world of cool colors. Earth tones providing for a new sense of elegance when the primordial nature of things has been completely lost.
We place trees strategically, contemporary warmth derived from designs birthed centuries ago on factory floors. Iron and wood, and the color of rust pretend to suggest a legacy of use.
Everyone should have a stone, to hold and cradle within one’s hand. Or so was told as a child, but this is the Age of the Facade.
Language returns daily to forms that would recall the lost languages comprehensible with new appreciations for dots and dashes and misappropriations of meaning. It is as though we are standing on the brink of a digression into babel, a modern age, in which all things are recycled and reformed.
Something must be lost in this process, I am sure of this,
and perhaps, also a stone in one’s hand.
By: Wendy E. Braun
The Starlings moved into the kitchen wall over a month ago, and I couldn’t help feeling like they belonged there, my apartment a testament to what would have been, been careful not to wake them when brewing breakfast. I had felt that way about the mice until I opened the cabinet last Sunday and found an army of mice or evidence of the stench of them. The Starlings can stay, but as in all good tales…
I laid out bricks of poison the way the government hands out welfare checks and minimal benefits. We all die with full bellies in the end and are angry for the expense of cleaning up the waste.
In my twenties I cried when my roommate trapped a mouse, its small grey paws glued to a tray like tar on a desert road. Black eyes wide, rounded ears white lined with pink veins, sound pulsing through the fragile frame. She caught me trying to apply grease to its paws and promptly placed it into a plastic bag to ensure the last breath. You see, she had gone after it with an umbrella, which I could never understand, or why it was the problem when the roaches had been the ones to spoil the fruit in the basket, and it was the Bronx, and we were still young.
Yesterday my neighbor scored a raccoon with marshmallow bait, and now its law to end it all owned land equaling a general lack of relocation. Somewhere inside my walls, the mice are dying, and raccoons with bellies full of sweets rot, and thank god for the Starlings wings, and pray that the landlord doesn’t care as he cares little for the mice. But save me from the dreams where the stinkbugs cover my eyes and my mouth, because they are the only ones that I know how to get out, and don’t we just want to get out, all of us out.
By: Wendy E. Braun
He feeds the birds
in moonlight –
cracked shells
in small mounds scatter
across the pavement.
A wind came and
shattered the feeder
some months ago.
Faded wood rests
on an old iron rod.
The door asks the post
to leave the packages;
he can’t hear the bell.
Still, he feeds the birds,
and cleans the chimes.
By: Wendy E. Braun
He said,
“I wanted to see the end of the world.”
And I said,
“You can’t, because it hasn’t happened yet.”
He said,
“Don’t be smart.”
And I thought about that–
and then the stars,
and the way light travels
through the universe,
even when they have
lost their glow,
and then how
it all ends,
and when we end,
and if we do
it won’t be over
because
we will
still be
light
traveling
and matter–
floating.
By: Wendy E. Braun
Watching,
tracking the patterns,
thoughts like moons
aligning in orbits
Something to be
had in
watching
silently.
Again, yes there it is
the collapsing of
one thought
into another like
dying planets dwarfed.
So many stars,
and millions of moons.
By: Wendy E. Braun
If on a winter’s night a traveler, like you
should come along and wake me from my slumber
or cause one greater then I had hoped
I will slam the door so promptly that it
will bump spring into being,
as to dissolve the “if” into
non-existence, so that he
who travels finds himself on
a train practicing dharma with a bum,
but not a bum but rather another
traveling man with wisdom
and desire for an open road
that extends out and into something
so other, something quite other than this
— then this and so on to the roads of Albuquerque
where the running spirits of the Pueblos dance
in the dreams of the cabbies whose cost is too high.
Wendy E. Braun - This Existence 