A Weed on The Curb

  Welcome to A Weed on the Curb, celebrating with the Sunday Muse. Sharing this for The Sunday Muse #200 and inviting you to come and explore the poetry and poets who are participating in this milestone. Spending time on a Sunday with the talented, engaged poets of The Muse allows me to listen to those things I can't speak and I'm grateful to be able to continue to do so.   The Ideal Limn a universe in silicon and nothing: All the air left in the lungs, rising. Leave the body in the glass, all princess, All specimen. Water sieved the rocks, But now it only holds the image  Of what was created, developed, set In the chemical booth in the dark of the heavens. A little about me: I live in Texas, in a suburban community a little north of Houston. I was born and raised in Texas and, given the past few weeks (years), I've had the song Anthem  playing in my head on repeat. We have two dogs with whom we compete for chair/pillow/blankets on a regular basis: When I'm working on

  Fox Edges At the fox edge of the shelf, in the shadows Where the pages are wheat fields in autumn Where the sun's daydreams lie as dust; In that corner, worlds sleep, laminate covers Pressed close, wormholes forming, fading. Remember crossing the delta to the river Where moons hung heavy, a crewel silhouette Of an old station leaning over the waterway? Knock on one, remembering a village, homely  Houses deep in the afternoon, where the whispers Turn into other rivers running by new waters. Everything running into summer pools Where I'll be swimming in the ink, At the fox edge of the shelf, in the shadows.  

 I've been having nightmares about empty cheese bins at the local HEB and hotel rooms full of kittens or     dogs which I have to conceal from the staff and to which I've lost someone else's key. I've been having nightmares about too many things poking out of too many barely closed doors. The dogs are happy to sleep through the chill weather but I have been restless in my hibernation. I'm not reading because I'm trying to shove words on paper and it feels...selfish. Like ignoring friends in the next room just to work on perfecting a wing liner in the bathroom mirror.  I think, sometimes, I need to take an axe to the root of the distraction. And sometimes I  am the root of the distraction.  How do you know when you've come to the end of your poetry journey? For me, when the joy of reading is soured by envy. And the sour isn't worth it.  When the house is clean, the poems will be in a box and the box will be somewhere I can visit rather than live.  -- chri

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #198 . Come & see what the poets are up to. :)  Against the razor of yesterday's beat, back and forth, strop until it snaps-- that old cobweb,  the seat restraint on memory. Clouds come rolling grumbling at the window Can't catch the rain, can't hold us. Lead us to the water, sing us cleaner than the curb just laid to slick the drowner's path. Clouds come rolling fumbling at the roofline Feel the prick of passing through down the streets where no cars go, river man calling, sliding loose down all the concrete Clouds come rolling humbling wall and window Clouds come rolling Clouds come rolling Greeting and salutations! It's been a week of discordantly trying to write my way around a growing sense that books are an "ancient technology" better suited to the discount racks at Goodwill and a strong sense that I need to find a place to experience poetry in the wild, in nearby readings. My brother says that I what I need is more

Sharing with The Sunday Muse for Sunday Muse #197 . Photography by  Kristine Wayman My hand was not shaped for the axe so it waited--tooth in the tough wood; back of its head warm, then hot, then cooler; body dreaming of wood made useful. When I brought it into the garage and left it, carefully, in a corner, it dreamed of being outdoors, felt the thin frame of the garage, the restless former forest underneath, and, then, it was just an axe. Silent, dreamless, and inert. Our forests are long forgotten.  Missed y'all last week!  -- chrissa