September 20, 2021 to October 3, 2021
from the full moon to the new moon in Virgo / Libra
venture
It was a foggy night. The smug was heavy in the air. Cere preferred the fog to the gas. If she had to venture a guess, she’d say this circle of hell was a repeating popularity pageant with the grand prize being the flashiest coffin lined with gold velvet cash-stuffed bedding and large enough to store the winner’s favorite toys and suckling gizmos. Cere had her money on Headuptheassicus, which was the nickname she gave Becky Green, the meanest and most popular demon at Hellmont High.
contemporaneous
As the sunlight shortens in autumn,
the moon’s contemporaneous rise
extends the bright moonlight
for several nights;
a hard turn through the zodiac,
the Earth responds softly
while the summer crops
are harvested in light
carved
These words, little doses
of dopamine, spill
onto the page encoding
feelings that range
beyond identification,
carved and contained
in the ink of description;
in the play of depiction.
priors
Do we wring life from its spine—every drop?
Jump over the haters or stop
I see a vault line:
faults and blame, bias and shame;
priors reenacted,
posturing exacted
in the primal part
of the brain.
How long goes
the era of suggestion?
Get ready to jump
brash
Her art made you think; it wasn’t explosively brash or cutting but just the tip of the tine limned through your mind exposing heavy artifacts you’d filed away, postponed as bigger problems you were helpless to solve. But obstructed by the feign of ignorance as doing nothing tips the balance of conscience toward inhumanity.
favorable, alarm
Above the clouds at our feet
If Love were a Titan, were
to step up on the highest
mountain, emerge
from the foam
neath the favorable
mythic moon;
silence
the alarm
of humors
balancing biles of thinner air
We are the very atmosphere
How easily these bodies
breathe as it carries us home
history
It was the biggest “FU” ever recorded in the annals of history. Its echoes shrank the Great Barrier Reef down to a chew-sized crouton. The sheer profundity reduced black hole theories to petty overthinking.
fret
Maena and I called him Gambusi because he looked like a worn one we’d found at a yard sale. The top fold of his rutted brow seesawed with each eye—the near-sighted one for glaring up close and the other for glaring at a distance—like a loose fret indented when a finger slides over it so that a higher harmonic rang with his every word, like the echo of a knife being sharpened, like the hint of screech when that same finger hovers close to a flame. Gambusi was wound tight—warped neck, too; his chin evolved back and down, locked, with no movement in that direction, just the side-to-side head shakes of “no.”
rivulet
Blue Kill rivulet,
I follow you to the fork
on the banks where
my baby walked before
The water picks up speed
just before the tributary,
rejoins the mighty
between this widening shore
aim
Said a man with his best aim:
“I’ll throw my hat in the land of milk and honey”
When the material veil had been lifted
his mind ran like fire ants
crepuscular
The sun retires and shadows lighten,
the wistful glow of our golden hour fades
Specks of light turn on like fireflies
while the deer, fox, and bat play
in the crepuscular twilight;
their cool blue silhouettes
evanesce from human sight
stutters
It lands casual
gradual macabre concern
then a want to share
pain all day
all day
Stutters
of ingrained emotion
till you confide your
deepest stains
Then it neatly packs
both stories
and flies away
flies away
shadows
“While others accept impermanence, we do not conclude such bleak ways of thinking. Our bleakness is in the ode to death but not in its permanence.” A dark shape fell across Maena’s face adding punctuation in that we did not dwell on shadows as harbingers of the sun’s end.
cemetery
If you, Death, were
at my cemetery,
I’d let the friction
of your inevitability
set fire to our effigies
as scapegoats for envy
While the devil
repossesses our
earthly talents
that shake off
in the final dance.
©2021 LAFogle / Lesley Ann Fogle