Lisa A. Flowers is a poet, essayist, critic, vocalist, ailurophile, cinephile, and the former Reviews and Special Features Editor for Tarpaulin Sky Press. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Entropy, The Collagist, and other magazines and online journals. Raised in Los Angeles and Portland, she now resides in the mountains of Colorado. Visit her here.
.FROM DIATOMHERO AND NIWOT’S WAKE (ORDER HERE)
THE END: A DECONSTRUCTION OF MYTH AND ELEMENTS
After his death
The high roads leading up to his mind
Were salted
So his admirers and the bereaved
Could reach him, to pay homage.
Days after the ascent
Images were still coming out the untended cage of his cranium
And wandering down the mountain, like sheep
One night,
A group navigating his brow, with snow tires,
Saw something in the lane ahead.
"Look,"
One said, and stopped the car.
"There's an image crossing the road. Don't startle it."
The thing stared at them for a moment,
quietly munching its abundance
Then moved off into the falling snow.
They had thought they were the final strays.
But when they panned the camera out, over the valleys they saw thousands of
displaced myths
Swarming over hill and dale, like sheep:
Achilles, being dipped into the water of life
Split in two
By Excalibur's thrust,
Princess Thermuthis,
Lifting Moses out of the reeds,
Dropping the baby in terror
As Jenny Greenteeth hissed at her
Skin slimed from centuries in English ponds
Beginning to brown and wither under an Egyptian sun it was never intended for,
The skies over the Sahara
Sliding over Scotland
Ruining the watery ecosystem of that bog
Until a successful tongue undid the drought
Mother Earth forced into flagrante delicto to save herself
Moving over the South Pole
Gushing the
Arctic, that region of desperados
Where water hides as ice
And stays very still
Fearing
The awful coursing of spring that will unloose it and
Arethusa's refuge in the Nordic myths
Down cheekbones that sloped in ways
That made skiing down into them irresistible;
Their high planes curving
Into rolling hills of glass, like Grimm
When you threw your magic comb behind them
Mountain after mountain
Eddying into a long downslope of Rockies, Alps, and neck
In spite of dams
Stopped at the highest point of vigilance,
Sinking like elevators of tongues to a certain floor
A low dropping of blues
Where the violins opened their storm cellars in the rain.
Lovers discovered, soon enough, that memories were flushed out faster with body fluids.
Their memories began to collapse and crumble into one another
One's eyes flooding with tears
The other skidded for miles into the dark on
To the end of a tunnel
Blinking with wires and DNA.
Presently, sounds began to ooze from them
A condensation of bells,
Scraped off the skin in a Roman bath,
And their minds became incontinent
Love blossoming around them
Like warm urine in a bed
One settles into before they realize what it is,
Their genitals moistening
Like helpless patients that needed to be turned
An embarrassing greenery on its back,
Flailing like a tortoise.
RORSCHACH
...The backseat. I got all gummy with myself.
But there were no sounds,
Only subtitles,
Languages rushing at me, like insects
Suddenly displaced from recognition,
Czech buzzing into my left ear, like a swarm of flies,
German booming out into the forest,
The dullness of tomato plants
Buzzing with flies
That had no sound or life
In either dimension;
A photograph of what my perception had looked like when it had been mine.
So I didn’t know if I weren’t a
Soldier, hidden among the tall marshes
Dressed in one of those grass suits
Or Miss Jessel, beckoning across the river
A brute’s opaque smear coming up the other side
Of a retina filmed over
As frosted glass, behind which he still moved with his candles
Suddenly running clear
Like the eyes of the first people
Before ancestry polluted them,
Little shoots of green coming up
In the original dark eye of Jerusalem
To make hazel
With its hope of fecundity through the earth.
After awhile I opened my napkin
And recognized myselves:
Two Versailles rivals turning fans to each other’s disdain,
A flattened hydra peeling itself off a window,
“Beast Turning human,” like Nora Flood’s lover.
They said, after the war, we lost each other.
I said, after our deaths, we lost each other
Refugees, displaced persons.
I had no way of knowing I’d not just picked
An armful of my
Daughter, reborn as lilies
For an Easter bouquet; that my son wasn’t a dog
Busily digging his old human bones up out of the earth and gnawing on them,
The freezing looking into photographs of a sun
That can’t warm them
The starving looking into photographs of food
They can’t eat
Knowing they can no longer stretch out the past
As a frugal mother stretches out meat and potatoes
From casserole to stew,
With ever more mouths to feed
Until five hundred lives cannot consume
The rations for one
And we are too menny.
A bereaved nurse in the maternity ward
Who unknowingly delivers the reincarnation of her son,
Washes her hands of blood and afterbirth,
And goes home,
Never knowing what has been returned to her.
Prelude to the moment when a soldier
Dying on the battlefield in ancient Greece
Flows into his reincarnation
As a girl, blonde and Norwegian, in the high country
His life wrenched out of him like a discus
That goes flailing off to the Lord
Trailing roots, black against the sky,
A girl whose fate had drugged her intuition
With chloroform
So she couldn’t sense what was going to happen to her
Springing out of her body and rushing 20 miles into town
To alight in the body of the police dog
Who will eventually find her remains;
Lovers baking themselves deep into the currants
And chocolate chips
Their flavors running together in the dough
Until a hand, as in Grimm’s bereaved mother
Cuts the loaf
And blood flows over the tiles
Because Poverty and Humility Lead to Heaven.