poetry

This End Up

Moving means “This End Up”

Moving means saying goodbye to dust

A house is always so  much uglier on the way out.

On the way in the end was up,

they were happy, hopeful, the marriage was so new.

 The carpet, once bone colored, fresh-

now is ash grey.

Stains of arguments leave cigarette burns where they stood

and cursed.

Moving time and memories are crammed into separate boxes.

What parts of their marriage will be donated?

 Or thrown away?

He weeps one last time as they pass in the bathroom,

 a dispassionate changing of the guards as they take turns for the shower.

He weeps.

“It’s been such a long time since we were naked together.”

Moving means “This End Up”

Our fragile boxes must be handled with care.

poetry

The Party

I was totally thankful for the party,

for the balloons that squeaked when you rubbed them

 and crepe paper like the skin of an old woman’s throat.

I was touched by the invitation on pink construction paper, 

my name spelled out in glittering stickers.

The silver letters were crooked, but the meaning was the same.

We whistled like birds,

and gorged on cookies and cake.

My heart quickened by sugar, 

lips red from fruit punch, 

brown crumbs under my fingernails.

Sweat was mashed to our skin,

panting on our bikes as we left the party.

The sickly sweet feeling of being too full and too sticky

we stopped at the park,

rolled on the cool grass and 

decided to count the clouds.

Then a man in sunglasses came, with a black mustache.

I could see our faces in the reflection of the lens, mouths agape 

in timid horror.

He said we were pretty,

and asked for directions to the elementary school.

more poetry

Walmart

I want to walk down the spacious aisles 

with white beams crossing each other in a grid overhead.

I’m sentimental for three dollar shirts where the hem comes undone in a week.

I imagine my mom’s dry hands

with long red fingernails

gripped around the blue handle of the shopping cart,

her lips pressed back in a closed-mouth, half smile.

Her eyes cooly observing as she strolls from aisle to aisle,

carelessly unaware or rather purposely unaware 

of the fact

that she can’t afford to shop there.

She’s not paying attention to how badly her hair has thinned.

My heart sees her the way it always has;

majestic in her full bosom and red nails,

pushing a shopping cart like a queen.

Her hair is white at the temples and the rest hangs in a low curl

of bottle brown.

Yet her cooly observing eyes are still regal, beautiful in Walmart,

beautiful in shabby sandals,

stretching a dime

More poetry

But not Superman

The celebrated artist took his life.

Hero to many

he defied stylistic consistency,

fully grasped small anybodies

trying to understand,

and perhaps order

the show, not a career.

Revealing.

Pursuing.

Videos from earlier,

which began in the 1980s,

it was organized,

insightful.

The main attraction here was working when he died.

An old compressed air tank lies on the floor,

a hose connects it to the bell-jar,

and each picture in close-up:

a bottle. 

Thus you behold

different colored liquid that is swirling because of a stream of air,

You behold

in pristine miniature under glass

the chaos that nearly consumed it.

A grown-up’s fantasy of childhood 

as a blissful, golden age;

it was a vision,

 the repressed memories of real-life tarnish and terror.

The utopian culmination of a crystal city

was marred

by a clear awareness of its own history.

This Superman, champion of truth,

had been reciting passages from literature about horrors

before he slept.

Superman meant something more;

saving the world in great and small ways,

was an idealist of the first order,

a deeply disappointed one.

 -Claudine Woodard

poetry....

Believe in the limitless.

Create something you care about.

You can watch,

stagnant,

waiting.

Or you can move.

Press forward.

Chase the dream;

an idea that cannot get away.

Run.

-Claudine Woodard