Lady Lavender

Foxglove in a Washington, D.C. garden
She came sailing in —
foxgloved murder digitalis
among shape-shifters in ash-colored silk
an Austen novel in her head
drysalter’s pharmacopœia of prurience
in everyone else’s closet Gothic
pawned in a room of Macbeths
unshriven, exhumed desire
— sailing in, lighting torches
blanketed fire,
lavender swan.
At d’Verse Sarah asked us to write a Quadrille of 44 words using the word "Ash." 
This is a reworking of an earlier poem.
Click on Mr. Linky to read more.

The Accidental Rose

Seeing a rose, I once said that we stand out like that, red on green, and you reply, tongue-in-cheek, you mean like an ambulance at 3 AM in a Mississippi swamp and I shut up, crushed, like you’d said we were an accident that had been waiting to happen, as if crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end, just a screeching of brakes, a clang of metal, the jolting of bones, and then the long drawn out police report and insurance claims, a ledger of rights and wrongs, and the spindrift pages in the moonlit night where my heart spills and the nightingale vies with a shrike impaled on a thorny bush that ought to have a bloom, a rose, while someone, no one, looks for a medic to resuscitate the dead in an ambulance at 3 AM.


For Cee's FOTD 
and dVerse's Prosery where Merril asks us to use a line from a Jo Harjo poem, “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end,” to write a 144-word piece of prose. Click on Mr. Linky and join in!