by Beth Gordon
All in by Beth Gordon
by Beth Gordon
You loved me as sword grass, ungreen and venomous, my new
edges drawing scar, you loved me as heron, long-legged and coastal, as catastrophic forest
fire, blackened limbs and skin as translucent
as winter leaves, full dead and metamorphic, my awful knees
locking between your ribs without a single rattle or cicada song. You loved me as barren,
unable to flesh, as unhatched egg in April snow, as discarded nest, feathers and fur
dissipating at my death-moth touch. You loved me as teeth,
as fingernail, as bottled ship in an unforgiving ocean, as broken
mirror shards. You loved me as wanderer, desert-starved and waterless,
as scalpel-carved, without appendix or breast, you loved me as other,
hungry-boned and insubstantial, as half-remembered crow song, as ghost to my unfed self.
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Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been widely published and nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two previous chapbooks and her full-length poetry collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, was published in 2021 (Kelsay Books). Her third chapbook, The Water Cycle, is being published by Variant Lit in January 2022. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books.
by Beth Gordon
When physicists in Oak Ridge swung the door
wide to glimpse the negative of narrow
existence, a snail with wet wings emerged,
leaving a contrail, and then hummingbirds,
sluggish and attracted only to shades
of white, and called by metaphysical
choirs to reunite with God and my
father appeared, his oiled brain in clockwork
order, to decode triangulations
of weeping willow funerals, lightning
bugs and vanishing tar pits, but did not
know my face, my doppelgänger long drowned
in mud waters and no one through either
mirror knows if it was an accident.
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Beth Gordon is a poet, mother, and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two chapbooks: Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press) and Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbird Publishing). She is Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.
by Beth Gordon
This spring I am required to turn the tap left, ending the river of recycled
tears, I am required to pray to living children, to their knees and small stomachs,
their throats and green toes, I am required to cover the witch’s well with cut cedar,
board it up with magic mirrors buried beneath the bones, I am required to float
with my grandson in sun-blue pool water, his unscarred skin so gentle a sponge for
all things clean and in flight, his good hands in motion, his fingers antennae, his voice
as deep as a baby bullfrog, creaky as a rusted bell, I am required to
look into the face of my newborn grand daughter, her crystal ball eyes revealing
her amber-scented future with 90 years of hurricane survival stories,
not the weedy-trailed paths of the past, snakes tasting her heels as she passes, this spring
I am required to take a lover, let something touch my skin that was born in floods
of blood and womb-water not wool-woven or cast iron, I am required to use
my body, remove it from the cellar where it hides with canned okra, mulberry
jam, I am required to drape it around my songs, I am required to pinch and be
pinched, to bruise, to slither, to goosebump, to wander with memories of tongues and teeth,
to wallow in muddy creeks with tadpoles and crawfish, I am required to dry my-
self with forsythia and dandelion dust, until I am aglow with yellow.
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Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother, currently landlocked in St. Louis, MO. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous journals including Into the Void, Noble/Gas, Five:2:One, Verity La, Califragile, Pretty Owl Poetry and Yes Poetry. Her chapbook, Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe will be published in May 2019 by AHC Press. She is also the Poetry Editor of Gone Lawn.
by Beth Gordon
Hungry for asparagus and honeysuckle, damaged forsythia,
the thick persistent dandelions which have also just arrived, we sit
on the unswept deck and drink the last of syrupy Christmas wine,
ready for clear liquor and citrus, lemon or lime or tangerines,
for violets to emerge from the muddy ground, purple and naïve
to our impatience, our forced hibernation, our weeks of unpredictable
temperatures and hurricanes where there is no ocean.
Mockingbirds repeat our hungry cadence and wait for baby
foxes to respond, the white cat bathes in half-damp dirt, letting newborn
field mice escape his precise claws, today is not a day for murder
or lightning, he looks the other way because he knows where
to find them in morning darkness, he will always find them no matter
the season, the barometric pressure or category six tornadoes
or possible ice in the first full days of May.
A train groans its winter song unaware that crows and lesser birds
are disoriented, dizzy with pollen, unable to mimic the sound
of February frost, of legal gunfire, deadly force, of inconsolable
mothers, on this late April evening when the sun promises to bloom
until midnight, swaddle us like abandoned babies on Viking ships,
our sun-starved skin ready to shed, to metamorphose
into living creatures who need no touch or care.
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