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Medicine

1
Rain churned puddles to mud,
an earthy agitation, unbound and determined.
Medea could not remember such audacity, had it been so long?


Oh... she knew good, good and righteous as Sunday morning.
Divine too, sandalwood rose from her skin,


her hair, a tumble of honeysuckle, of ivy,
her toenails, tiles of teal, robin egg shards.


Like a prayer wheel, her cat circled.
The hour was sepia, it twirled with house wrens,
handlebar moustache on a tall dark afternoon.


Medea slipped into flannel, tucked up with books of blue stories -  
with Anais Nin: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”


She took another look in the mirror.


The burmese curled behind her knees, bony bag of fur
had followed Medea’s trail of spice and Gershwin for a feline century.
He was her familiar worn down to essentials:
whiskers, heart, liver, lungs - a living altar of impunity.


She rose from her reading, the cat stretched;
another tin peeled open: chicken of the sea.
Bag of bones preferred cottage cheese,
and Medea was oblivious.


She poured a dram of scotch, silky smoke on her tongue,
her night train at the station.
Peck and rattle - interloper at the window,
her train idled, and she gazed at true frontier.


The flicker tapped again.


She sat her wide bottom onto a blue chair.
It groaned out of habit, she sighed out of envy
for the prowess of the aerial swimmer, messenger
who made an afternoon tilt, goose-fleshed and breathless.


The old cat licked its paws.


Medea decided if birds were couriers, then vespers
should transcend providence, and 3 am would be
the portal of preference for neglected souls.


She often confided:


in this life, dismiss what you will -
But never take mischief for granted.
Trouble knows us better than God.


A crow called amen from a fence post.
A cobweb fluttered in the breeze.


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Naughty needed to be here…


Medea imagined being veraciously rendered in hot water,
in calamity; opening a door to deep sky, star-dizzy,
corrupt with space trash and comets.


She wanted to swap galactic murmurations
for love knots of pine in a brush pile,
pyronic, ready for flash point.


So she flattened to follow the flicker: banshee, angel, bogeyman.
Unfurled as cautionary tale, as taboo wooing its sister fate,
A compass-rose of slash and burn.
All night she soared until she was dream demanding a body.


Some say baptism Is a shit storm for sin,
Some say life wants to soak up the holy.
That morning mischief chose to dance with everything.


Medea decided to forgo coffee and toast.


Gumption had dusted each surface,
the wind was at her back, a flicker between her knees.


She was spirit and blood, vessel and  journey, pendulum,
suspended on thin nylon in every window.
She swung east and west - spring to winter.


A pilgrim unfolded into lion, into lamb, into ladder, into tomb of kiva.
She crouched in sage dust, in dappled sun.
It was her turn to be sipapu, cedar smoke, dog soldier, shaman.


To be her own blue book -
to sidestep tweets and memes, to keep the cast confusing.


She was dust storm, swarm of riled bees,
eagle feather lance, acres of bison headed for the cliff.


She exuded America indivisible -
home of the brave, home of kaleidoscopic clans.


Poetry of mycelium and aspen clone;
the invincible persuasion of wide prairie, of Badlands,
of Black Hills and Red River, of Standing Rock First Nation.


Mirror mirror: mythic to granite!


Coyote clan to cleave the heads of a pipeline monster,
Green bottle flies to carry them far from our story.
Grandmother Spider to seal the rend.
Heyoka to rouse the rooster at 3 am.


An earthy agitation- the right medicine.
And drums to pound rain into stone.

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