Shed for You

In the wounded haze
of this unfolding moment,
Black Jesus slips to earth,
unshaven.

Dressed in torn jeans,
he sits, hookers at his feet.
Sunlight circles his head.
Complaints rush in to city hall
about wine found in the water main.

We turn on the sprinkler,
cares tumbling from fingertips
as we soak in the amber spray.

Our bodies glow
from memories rising
of days long ago, days
when you still loved me.

Artist’s commentary:

I often think of the people we pass in our everyday lives who are filled with goodness and the ability to inspire goodness in us. We don’t see many of them because we judge them by their outward appearance and dismiss them. The poem is a tribute to those unseen people.

Abstract Cross by Mary Hillier

A fast way of painting by simply blocking in color or in this case the lack of it except for two bright blue squares.

Baptismal Font

Pink and green mansions sizzle
in Palm Beach’s white heat,
windows shuttered, lawns tended
by riff raff from the wrong side
of the Intracoastal Waterway.
Shaggy haired JilRoy Roco gazes
across Ocean Boulevard to padlocked gates
blocking beach belonging to these MIA rich
to the high tide line.
JilRoy figures beaches belong to God,
not these see and be seens who call
only to complain their shrubs
are cut too short or too tall,
who treat him like the Invisible Man
or Tonto trailing in Silver’s dust.

He tosses weed eater into truck, drives
north to the Palm Beach Public Beach
where, no longer invisible, so dark
against anemic rich tourist skin,
he saunters to the low tide line,
heads south into no-man’s land,
feet sinking into wet sand, waves
seeping over work boots.
Odysseus in a lawn cutter’s uniform.

I see him approach this end of God’s beach,
a shadow in the fading light.
Sand clings like sequins to his soaked pants.
His eyes are dewdrops; hair, seaweed.
I want to kiss him, draw him under
the pier, make love to courage.
Instead, I hand him my water bottle.
He pours it over his head.

Artist’s commentary:

This poem accurately describes the situation with ownership of the beaches over in Palm Beach. I used to bike weekly through that stretch of closed up mansions and rusted-shut gates and never saw anyone using the beach. Despite that, just to walk the beach would incur a fine. One day a friend of mine went to the public beach in Palm Beach at low tide and walked below the tide line those 13 miles south to ‘legal’ territory again. He became my personal hero for doing this. I made him into JilRoy because so many of the workers over there are dark skinned and invisible.

Green Flamingo by Mary Hillier

Love of that creatures elegant shape has me painting them over and over.

Dawn

He slips out of my dream,
eyes filled with moonlight,
and embraces me.
He’s young again, body mended
by the laughter of innocent children,
the scent of blossoming flowers.

If I open my eyes to cry happiness
onto his shoulder he will fade,
rejoin the invisible dead,
so I dream on, desperately,
until dawn breaks, taking him.

Artist’s commentary:

This poem was inspired by the death of someone close to me. So many times people who’ve died appear to me in dreams and I’m grateful when they do . I get to see them again and I don’t want that dream to end.

Face Drawing by Mary Hillier

Actual portrait drawn from a mask of my own face.

Priscilla Ann Campbell

The poet says:
Romantic relationships have played an important role throughout a good part of my life, so they’ve naturally evolved into fodder for many of my poems. Who doesn’t think at some point about that old love never forgotten or wonder why one relationship worked, yet another fell apart. Perhaps one advantage of growing older is that I’ve sampled “the good, the bad, and the ugly” and survived to write about it. The poems in this selection represent more of the yearning end of the spectrum, but carry content I feel many women (and men) identify with.

City of forgiven whores

In this city
where birds fly upside
down, and sadness is a welt
made by a raindrop, he comes to me.

He speaks of sleep-talking dreamers,
whores dunked by blind preachers,
then kisses me like when we were young.

I tug him inside
and we soar till our wings melt —
two candles, burnt to the nub
of a universe rebuilding.

We fall past old gods
converted to new ways of seeing
into the clear cleansing river of Eros
that finally Huck Finns us away.

Colorless rooms
 
 

In the lineup of old lovers,
he never appears,
yet he was the one who peeled back my skin,
slipped fingers beneath breastbone.
Odd, his disappearance, when a decade
of heart thumps had to pass
before flesh closed and healed.

I wonder if his next love remembers.
 
Maybe those men who once slung their arms
’round our necks, painted hieroglyphs with lips
on our breasts, wake now in colorless rooms,
bewildered to find no woman beneath them.
Maybe they remember a dimming face,
a distant laugh … a sigh,
& dream of those days when their hands
still forged fingerprints into the hollows of time.

Eruptions

Does any woman never imagine
running into that special old lover —
her Olympian God
her angel we have heard on high,
the one who climbed into her heart
so deeply he split it?
 
His touch rocked my seismic meter off scale,
this man who still walks into my dreams
occasionally.
 
He gave me a tart-red sexy hat;
                  nightly earth shakes.
Like Jericho, my walls fell apart. 
 
He lives twenty minutes away.
That many years since I last saw him.
 
I tremble sometimes when I run to the pharmacy
or health food store.
What if he’s there?
Will my heart bleed all over the soy and chick peas?
 
An aging woman, in a splattered tee
making a fool of herself
all over again.

 
Blowing it

We always say
we were happier ‘back then,’
bum broke, closets bare
as a beggar’s pockets,
making love on the floor,
sprung sofa, that
Salvation mattress,
spooning together all night,
but we still glutton stuff
as salaries go up, buy
fancy dresses, silk ties,
CDs we don’t play,
throw out more food
than those starving
children in China could
eat in a year, sleep
in our expensive four-poster
not touching;
too fat with sate
to want.

Priscilla Ann Campbell

Sara chops her lunch into equal sized bites,
moves it around on her plate
                       leaves white spaces
pretends to chew when anyone looks her way,
slides food into her lap.

Sara thinks her belly is as big
as the rising moon, that her thighs rival
those giant Doric pillars on the Parthenon.
Ten pounds down and she could be a runway
model like Anna Reston once was
or Barbara Di Criddo, strut flat-eyed
                             and loved,
a human hanger for size zero dresses.
She doesn’t know her runway is fated
to be a dark graveyard row, her trophy
a bouquet of dead roses.

Sara dreams the mirror tells her she’s beautiful.
She bows to her make-believe audience
holds frail arms out like angel wings for a curtsy,
smiles as her flesh melts down from bone
                                  to fairy dust
                                            to ground.

Priscilla Ann Campbell