On the themes of Your Very Flesh, Rivers, and Salt
Handyman
Our house turns thirty-five this year. At thirty-five, most women glow. Not so
this dowager we own. At thirty-five, she’s come undone;
her ceilings peel, streaked windows stick, their sashes grimed, cracked tiles tilt,
our feet career like drunks’ across this ever-shifting plain.
This winter, rain upthrusts back steps above the rusted transom’s height. We eye
the pool, its leaf-strewn scum but cannot skim the brown from blue
without a trudge around the house, which often seems too hard to do. The leaves
increase; the back door mocks, its bottom snags against the rock for weeks.
This morning, when I supplicate, my spouse agrees to bend and break the grip
of stubborn stone that blocks this exit from our home.
Of solitary temperament, he gathers up the implements and toils all alone.
His white hair dulls in clouds of dust, hands chalked, face ghosts behind the glass.
He spins the disc against the heaving rock. He swears and sweats, yet wears no mask
amid this whirling sand and grit. He hates to fix this broken place,
convinced he isn’t clever with his hands. He throws aside the mask I find, breathes deep
as milky particles mix toxic swirls beneath a muted sun.
It’s true he is not dexterous. I listen to him grunt and cuss, feel guilty sipping coffee,
sitting down.
To tamper with this doorway is another job he thinks he’ll fail. This notion settled deep
inside in childhood, it controls him still.
His lungs ingest the specks he breathes. He lights a smoke, and he breathes deep
because it makes this job he hates a different job, a calling he’s embraced:
No love, no sense of victory, can change my husband’s entropy. He labors hardest
in his lust to downsize to a maintenance-free grave.
Storm
Nimbus drape their bulk over the bluffs and growl. A body
is transformed by purpose into muscle and sinew.
She maneuvers over rocks to embrace the onrushing storm,
gone too far to retrace the steps that led here. The summit
peaks just ahead. She rises, a white flag above the Mississippi.
Fingers peel and discard rags of the past, tatters of colorful cloth
slide away on the wind. A wedding ring rattles down the slope,
plunges through the water below. She teeters, naked on the cliff edge,
wild sky black. Arms spread, she dives through the terrible rain.
Playa Encanto
The first morning we wake, trucks shower water
to bind the red dust to the road. Only beach grass
and ice plant survive on the bluffs of Encanto.
We unpack our suitcases, boxes of food,
then begin our ritual walk along the sand.
Danny spies a shimmering shape near the water.
Moving closer, we see a baby dolphin rocking
in the swell, its mouth full of bacterial scum. It rolls
on the tide. An open eye points to heaven; its neck gapes,
slit by fishnet or gaff. Perhaps it was Alejandro
with the golden incisor who sells knock-off Brighton bags
when shrimp aren’t plentiful. His stall on Calle Principal
offers shell necklaces and strings of sea horse cadavers
at a very good price. Steel-blue skin peels from the slash.
Color shines from the revealed gash: yellow, almost pretty,
like the guayaba we slipped between our lips at breakfast.
Its belly oozes a second wound, sculpted like a smile.
Danny drops his skim board and gentles the body
onto higher sand. Entrails slip from the slit and whirl
in the surf. Blood christens Danny’s beach shoes
then is washed away by the waves. His face turns
from me: a little boy who thinks he’s too old for tears,
with questions to ask, but answers aren’t easy.
We float the baby back to deep water, bury it
beneath Encanto’s waves.
Author Biography
JP Reese has poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and writer interviews published or forthcoming in many online and print journals including Metazen, Blue Fifth Review, and The Pinch. Reese is Associate Poetry Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, and a roving editor for Scissors and Spackle Cervena Barva Press has scheduled Reese’s second poetry chapbook, Dead Letters, for publication in 2013. Her published work can be read at Entropy: A Measure of Uncertainty, jpreesetoo.wordpress.com.