Yolk drizzles past
Shell-shocked eye
Yellowed violence courses
Through taut ribboned pigtail
Over rivulets of peach crinoline
Spackling black patent leather
Seething up spine.
Easter, fucking Easter
And I so prim and starched
That I dare not
Bolt and bash
Those bastards to
blue-black pulpish hew
So much becoming
A 6th grader
At PS 92.
These Barrio bitches hate me
I am Younger
Smarter
Whiter (oh, MF, yay for me!)
Luckier am I.
But they don't see
The internal alchemy
Of my unnatural deformed
life
That makes never waking
my only prayer
at lonely pew, bedside
"Now I lay me down to sleep...
...good-bye."
It is fine for on the morning
I'll be
Waiting
by the Pit.
And I will grind their
faces in dog shit sand.
smothering sneers to sniveled
drooling erasures.
Dammit!
I will kill them all.
For single file
they have
No guts
And
I will
Clean hands
On sirloined t-shirts
Leave them frying in the dust.
But now that the sun has witnessed
This cruelest sham
Of sweetest childhood play
I ask
Does baking in this
Sulfurous stench
Make me Christ worthy
On this most glorious of days?
Fuckin' A, fuckin' A
I say...
Silver
Streams
Seamless
Steam
Steeps
Salt
Liquescence
Blanch
Iris
Clean
(...brown once...yes...
The Caring
Beg
To Cradle
Touch
Speak to me.
Weep with me.
(I've got you, Princess...
Go.
As was my gilded joy
So is my iridescent sorrow.
Mine
says my solitude
Mine.
Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the 'prehistoric' epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. Her most recent work appears in Ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but so was Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.