Fairytales

I kind of had fun creating my own little folklore for this one :) I'm curious to hear what kind of story you come up with!

For critique:
Are there too many details in the "things not to do"?
How does it flow?
What does the ending (the part in brackets) mean to you?

"The Witch over the Mountains"

Listen:
in her youth, one day she
flew up over the mountains,
turned her hair black and
went to dance with the goblin king.

Hush, children -
she is the earth itself.
Only eat your chestnuts after roasting,
and do not walk barefoot in the grass;
she reaches for you.
Beware her grasping soil fingers.

Take no apples or sweets,
trust not to luck or coincidence,
always close the garden gate,
and pick the bugs from wildflowers
before taking them home -
or else the goblin king will take you
to dance with him, too.

[Over the schoolyard:
a vulture of perched storm clouds,
a sudden, brief god
of cat's cradle strings
and splayed fingers.
And moist earth, like parted lips,
electric and open to the rain,
casts her spell.

A flock of seraphs
hovers at cloud-edges to watch.] 

Salt of the Earth

Not...terribly proud of this one. I feel like it could use to be tightened up. I'm trying to move away from the first-person perspective that has sort of plagued my poetry for the last couple months. Not sure how well I pulled it off. Any and all comments to that effect are appreciated.

"Dry"

Bring the heat -
a second skin to shroud the horizon in dust.

A call and response:
sing, cicadas,
trill your stick legs and bead eyes.

Not daring to look back
and not knowing why,
you listen to the rattlesnake buzz -
it speaks in its low hum and hiss,
a song of grasses and endless sky.

Draw the salt up through the dirt -
crystals sprout from hair folicles,
paralyze eyes open wide.
Schrodinger's ghost haunts
the in-between places,
the gap where salt gathers in veins
and in the marrow of bones.

Stretch: a crystal demon,
a pillar of salt
spreading petals skyward.

North Carolina

I realized I keep kinda writing these little haikus about my home state. I went ahead and just...combined them all. An ode to North Carolina :)

I would eagerly accept any comments. Please be aware I have gone with the "real" definition of haikus - that is, the 5-7-5 format is simply a "guideline." None of the lines will exceed 5-7-5, but some will have fewer syllables. The point of a haiku, after all, is simplicity, and adding a word just to fit in an extra syllable or two seems to defeat the purpose, haha.

"Haikus for North Carolina"

Thunder rolls--a dark,
heaving August dragon crawls
flaming toward sunset.


Last night's rain drifts
Heavenward, an old ghost
from the asphalt.


A ceiling of milk
tempts and teases, but
curdles, and sours.


A drop of water
seduces but leaves earth
parched as paper.


Moments before dusk:
silence fills the hollows
along the Blue Ridge.


We spend a summer
on edge--translating breezes
into hurricanes.


By night, the anger
of wet branches; by morning
just drizzles and wind.


A line of thick thieves,
rain-laden and steaming, lurks
into the rising night.

Thought

Oh, the process of writing. What joy, what fun.

How do you feel about the phrasing in the second stanza? Do the sentence fragments work?
Does the third stanza make any sort of sense? I worry it just sort of hangs there....comments appreciated.
How do you feel about imagery overall?
What section is the strongest/weakest? Why?

"Meditation on Thought"

Begin the quiet storm of fidgeting,
metronome-pen beating—
a drum, a drum:

Tempestuous—tearing
fingers through hair,
black eyes
crawling along
the insides of my lids.

My mind grows scrublands.
"What do you mean?" and,
"What do I mean?"

I tend slowly toward the abstract.
Pine trees sprout from my hair,
a forest of church steeples.
Whippoorwill am I,
chestnut-child Evangeline,
and my fingers stretch
architectonic
to build me bridges of stone,
a whole cathedral of bone archways.
My Michelangelo eyes sit restless
in a face of white and green marble.

The smallest drop of rain
against the window
and my thoughts collapse—
I must begin again.

There is a secret
fingernail-screeching
as the drops of water
roll down the glass. 

Equinox

This one was...interesting. I hope you like it. More funny business to do with identity, but it kinda ended up getting split into two people.

I'd love the usual comments on:
imagery - how well it flows, how strange it is, etc
sentence structure - I fear the presence of run-on sentences
phrasing - I've really gotten stuck in this "I am/we are" rut and it's starting to annoy me :( Thoughts?

"Equinox Lovers"

We come into being twice a year—
a balance of shadow and fire,
a half-lit moon face
pale blue and reflecting a still sun.

Sunflower faces follow me
westward, an ember
dying in a flame of thunderclouds.
Resonant and careful I am,
my molecules built on changing shapes.

You say to me,
"You're too young to be so shy,"
so I stand up and take your hand.

I am a glacier quivering atop cliffs
overlooking the North Atlantic,
but you exhale and
set me to smoking—

blowing candle flames free
like dandelion seeds.
We've learned to keep our breath
cool and slow,
draw it out steady to catch the wish
with a last puff.

We are a pair of Arctic winds
howling down Norwegian coasts,
flopping like fish into open hands.

I am a freshwater salmon—
cook me gentle, peel back my scales
and pull away my pink flesh
with a fork.

I've sought loves like evergreens,
whole forests of pine sap
at the midpoint of summer and winter,
at the crash of seasons
like waves on cliffs.

You are my old woman
speaking
to a silent theater
of all the Adams and Eves
and all their countless generations,
palm against creased palm,

a paragon of quiet
and falling evening—
the measured equilibrium
from my wrist to my thigh.

"Hush, now,"
you say to me,
"you're much too young to be so shy,"
so I take your outstretched hand
and close my eyes.

With a whisper I send
the night's first eleven stars
into the sky.

Thunderbird

This was an attempt at translating this photograph into words:

I really loved the colors of the bricks; it made me think of a desert, and then I started reminiscing about the time my family went out hiking at a national park in Arizona, got lost, and had to hitchhike our way back to our car. I hope the memory aspects of the poem helped translate the image itself.

All comments appreciated!

"Brick"


We forget the four wooden walls
that pressed their shape into rust-red clay—
the color of the dust on our shoes
from when we walked quartz crystals into the Arizona desert
and burned them clean beneath a ceiling of sun
so we could hear their voices:

a Thunderbird call,
sweet and high like the pounding of blood in our veins.

In the clarity of dried and smoking sage bundles,
a small image of you and me
gives itself over to the cactus plants
sprouting through the cracks that form
at right angles to each other.
We were told about the way we made our crystals part of the desert.

We got lost in the labyrinth of saguaros—lightning rods
in a sea of dust and stone.
In a moment of truth we held brush twigs in our hands:
baby thunderbirds
crackling against their cages,
whose mother's call guided us back to the highway.

The pattern beneath my feet is a stairway,
a bolt of lightning.
We sweep thunder under our wings and in our wake.

Quietness

There's this barn that I always pass any time I travel from my home in North Carolina to visit friends and family on the east coast. There's a little farm in a field beside the highway. It's just lovely :)

As usual, all comments appreciated :)

"Storm Quiet"

You spread yourself like Anansi-spider

across the border between Virginia and North Carolina,

all red and dry—

you ought to be a desert.

Land spirit,

the voice of your tin roof has fallen silent.

Heat storms crackle their lightning earthward,

treacherous and tempting,

but you can’t summon the rains for your fields anymore

and the grass roots

can’t draw the humidity into their whistling stalks—

their sound, too, has stilled

with a brownness beneath a scathing sun.

You wait for one more autumn

and its offering of apples.

When your children finally arrive

red and slippery as foals

you may go down to die

and perhaps the patient pre-storm silence

will break.