As Mourning Doves Persist

I pick up this stick pin. Fifty cents worth of ink. Consider animals on my path. Whether there is luck - good or bad. The dead visit me or I stand at the highest lookout, searching for their ghosts. Rippling Monarch butterfly reminiscent of mother, gone. Or patient hawk, like devilish departed step father on a tall roadside lamp post. Seeking meat and broken eggs below. We are carnivore though we don’t eat our young. Together, as children we learned of a heavenly place, were directed to picture the old dead greeting the newly dead. At night, my mind cannot cast out its doubts. Weighted foot blanket, grief. I conjure necessary recipes like dog-eared leaves of the Bible passed into granddaughters’ hands. Photographs mistaken for memories... ...Neither epiphany nor revelation. Only the faith to keep us in the circle. Dizzy and in concert with ground and sky and the envelope  between.

The body worker lifts  one word  from each visitor  as she finishes.  Erasure  or clue. Fatigue sawn off. Placed in a pot in a warm window just outside  the narrow  room.  Personalities  linger there:  belly dancer,  concrete breaker,  elementary  school teacher. diamond,  chisel,  pencil. honoring all who falter, Easter weekend, 2018

S acred stones roll around on the floor of my car, carried in over years of scavenging. Pocketed. Parceled. Placed on dashboard or grave.  Markers of present coloring past. The sun bathes the windshield just so and the secret messages written in mud or snow show themselves for the innocent blessing that they are. I walk into this side street café with my bruised heart in a purple and black satchel and am greeted by a circle of banjo players and one free seat against the window. Chairs like we inhabited in elementary school when things were still made of wood, grafted together at the corners with metal, corners rounded and smooth. We kept our notes in desks and lockers, wrote whispers of names we adored on the plain brown wrappers around our math books. Took broken bits and mending tape, carted cassette songs of guitar players who have since died or changed their names. Like mantras, directions to the river canyon where we could picture the rough rope as magical swi...

Photo Marcy Albin To take the sturdy and pungent spike that rims this flowerbed border. Ward off tiny invasions. Ants and snails, sluggish ships. Snip away what’s withered to live instead with this regal red lion’s head. Misfire severed from body ducts now on their own. Clear and untethered from the weathered pressing down.

photo Marcy Albin First surgical draw took a layer of desert. Ovaries like sweet petit fours, little ovens, gone in a mouthful. Fallopian tubes harvested as if cacti sliced and fed to dairy cows to embellish their milk. Inebriant of all poured through. Threat of rainwater torrent down arroyo at the blind curve ahead. Finally, I sleep the surprise of sticky after-taste. Prickly pear’s radish red fruit rolled into sweet jam and hard candies. My organs leaning into the hollow that once held my daughter. Remembering estrogen spurred nutrients moving into my breasts. Valentines tinged with day’s shadow.