Debrah Morkun: HERA CALF, 2. hera calf whispering room
Debrah Morkun is a founding member of New Philadelphia Poets.
Debrah Morkun’s first book of poem(s), Projection Machine, was released by BlazeVox Books in April 2010. She is a founding member of The New Philadelphia Poets, a group committed to keeping poetry alive in Philadelphia. She is currently at work on two long poem pieces entitled The Ida Pingala and Hera Calf. View some of her work at http://www.debrahmorkun.com/, and keep up to date with many of her happenings at www.newphiladelphiapoets.com .
HERA
CALF, 2.
hera calf whispering room
i remember her pigeon hands long & delicate like paper mache divorces kept in a mason jar collecting boys who presumably lived in the city she didn’t kill the one with a brain, she only used the scalpel to remove a few of his bones so she could give them to her father who was dying in the hospital i have turned off the Vietnam lamp next to her flower mother board a power-hungry hunter threw his hands up when the bear came he suddenly turned into a seahorse geometry pearl scum seahorse senator high sheriff flood reasonably historical, an effigy not an emotion word the cars have been parked in the darkly-lit caverns off Family Highway where the mother is a he-ghost charged up & radioactive Iphigenia fire marsh lumber gear forest tower this means Dante disguised as a girl is my boy look-alike she’s taking my power away a burning body evaporates, a pearl a liver unwritten Carthage compiled code war hardly an easy philosophy, to pull twigs from the ground. Hardly necessary, this image buried behind withdrawal symptoms a refusal to endlessly reach behind a code humming a physician a spectral dim light veranda cheap code a target for Anna so she can breathe into the doctor’s mouth so her porcelain spit can become a bridge, of course our first loss sucked out through the lips of the first person a wilderness where the grasses become a manual for walking through Hawaii this health food market where jana slaps stickers on organic bananas and i missed you, jolly no explanation you opened your hands and gave me your camcorder and i took movies of that big, big shape that was almost air and presented the films at the festival where i imagined you would be but in the car that night one peacock feather was a downer, a foolish harbinger, and he was paranoid, a bible-belt a vulture old woman, she was sitting in her chair i didn’t ask for this drunkard child birth but the baby fell out of my middle-section and sir this is an older woman pulling another baby from her lower-section, don’t meet her at the gallery you don’t know what will happen you’ll find her in court she’s mourned the loss of prouder things for years but this boy will do for within him, a grey day a noonish organism breathing we used to feed the pigs the apples that hung on our neighbor’s tree but when i was five, the common adventure of stealing these apples just for the pigs became a tired trick so we fed the pigs mysterious objects that we kept in our coat pockets there was no sense of fun or interest in our approach, but the zoom of the swine transmuting i should have shouldered the burden of those bright, orange photographs of this pleasure wishing well, a sack of smug intruders galloping to invade the dysfunction of the green lady who has gobbled up the trees not silent today, not an abstraction wherefore the window children invited it’s slightly darker here the first breeze, colder than the limbs of a guppy swimming a precision (code) was my father a charcoal woman walking over to the zoo where Benjamin Franklin’s salary a species ruined no future if in this ruination, all the money gets buried my brother has forgiven the present by breathing into the oil to bring it back to life but in the olden days, the years before we huddled in the gut corner and teddy roosevelt had the bathroom hogged and the whole family is aboard a rocky stormy ship and a small backroom in the family house has been set up for a destroyed cult fire comes quantam the rocks cover you and you’re covered, sediment i am speaking of a refusal to untie the electron-chord from the oxegyn company head quarters in august this metrocard will be worth the partisan bandage over my left eye illegal to close my eyes like this illegal to imply that my pedigree is gentile so i’m hardwired to think in terms of peculiar water falls i am speaking i lied when i told you that before the flood i listened to the drunk man who stood outside my apartment & advised me to call the electric company about the lightning i noticed that elizabeth was my reflection and so i could keep feral as long as i wasn’t really me i can’t stand death holes i’m saying my fellow creatures i am avoiding a death hole by leaping several feet into the sky but one day i know this poison this vendetta i’m going to fall into the death hole and i will see a prostitute standing there who is genderless and i will believe her to be elizabeth but the closer i look and i will see a blank nature form behind the curtains, she is a traditional villager who i don’t want to see keep me behind this old newspaper or karate chop and the sky falls i’ve never passed out on a marble floor before so i don’t understand the cadence of the second world gesture to stand even if the focus of the camera, a glint to be discredited a pyramid state like Scotland where there’s a moratorium on spider’s milk and at the dollar store this large eye is sold as medicine for the crippled. she is emerging from behind the thickets and she is mad. but i will tell you that anthropomorphic i could never withstand this intentional language used to set forth linguistic constraints about modern man. i see your little bones creaking under your skin and you dissolve into a sleepless headless cold England an old newspaper headline reads “she necessarily chooses Plato.” but from this vantage point, two beings are necessary so the neighbor made tea and for thousands of years the combination of borrowed money and the paintings we sold was like the beer we drank, sighing i, lopsided, stood in the morning, by the window of Peggy’s bedroom and saw the delivery guy out the window, carrying a freight train to her door O, now they’ve done the unjust thing, to carry crates twice their size and of course Peggy was stuck in June again, mozey-ing and i wished i was in the parking lot, a fierce bird or an elegant University of Phoenix she is stooping into the quarantine with her back to the surgeons in the briar patch grab the replicas of the peaches she’s picking to dime up the ignoble genealogies leafed through in the columbus dental room O the crops grew and while we were waiting to interrupt the box-like perimeter of the coffin-mask, Miranda rights soon the street was an entire continent, and she turned to look the surgeons in the eyes so it seems, she was lifted in the helicopter by her legs the nation testy, negated by Western geodes beginning to green into dark ravines where the brush bemoans anniversary i stood in the rock pit subnuclear, pre-existing because i chose to assemble the neutrons until they shifted the Mexican Border, anti-seizure, burning cumuli over the soot Apparition. in retrospect, a lighted boatman hemisphere-drain wise-crack in the corner, a wayfarer a prism memorial carelessly i drain this beak game entropy a migration settles, perhaps aspen is the state here, and the cicadas are an emblem of the country where pigeons are mean and nasty and exploited. You appear in the corner (or the surface) of this contract where the hungrier animals have completed their wanton shells, filling them with virgin island sand. on graham avenue, i picked several twigs from the ground and tried to build you an indian trading post where we could both sell our vultures she waited at the bus stop for the bulldozer to polish off the rest of the Motel 6, to demolish the last of the cheap hotels so this landscape could remind her more of the prairie where she first set to work, brandishing the tree crowns until the blossoms were precious lumber the atlantic. brave ones, a procession down church street with baskets of bread and the glare of dull cobblestone half cold although the children carry them mostly and we older than fourteen have wearied so much that before we finally make it to the young forest, all our wives have yellow stones in their hands and they are throwing them at Daniel who is another story completely, he is a bear-trap and a thin vein and our wives are making him give up his ludicrous desire to foil the sun and to drive the goats from this prairie-land timb-er, the trees, timb-er at the perfume shop called Venus Mary John was lonesome and surely weeds were growing out back in the parking lot where you could still smell the colognes and there were five men hauling seagulls to the surf’s edge in exchange for the bell that rings at mid-day but that day my eyes were drooping botanical gardens and it was the beginning of March there was one empty condom wrapper on my nightstand and Mary John was just a man in the alley that night, carrying a spring morning to the cleaners where he could be cold and sad brooklyn railroads behind downtown buildings the public farmland, unemployment agencies, per capita the future a circle of crouching people with over cast limber bodies i am afraid of experience and the people coming out of the bar toiled by Midsummer, they are mute in this village, mute & refined, and clearly they have jack-hammered the dead horses of the county seat dead grass, urban pasture flophouse Irma cooks supper and our cousins are departing for the low country. i said let’s smuggle this overpass neolithic out of this house closer to the valley where my friends have decided that all girls should leave toronto by morning the wind, the Yoruba tribe this beginning stretches slowly beyond the Delaware River Canal closer to the banks of a motionless man hole where Irma’s cracking eggs into a large green bowl and our cousins are packing their satchels and i am on the stoop with my bathrobe on stretching my arms like scratchy rhododendrons
