How To Start I cannot start without the dagger pain of a wooden splinter cored deep and burrowing in the dark. Bearded dog, limping Cuckoo wasp, the painted canvases are tumbling dominoes but I cannot start. Once I wandered onto property that was not mine and an old man came screaming up on a swastika-stamped ATV and the damp moss spat his beliefs in my eyes, and I was startled by a mind that was not mine. I could start then. Her Body She lifts her body with her body, moves her body with her body, sits down on a hard mahogany chair that holds her body while she tends to her body, as it is a creature that needs be tended. Cutting lentils and cooking rice to sustain her body, boiling water, infusing safflower that will quench her body, her body moving her fingers (a part of her body) with fine finesse and ease. She thinks nothing of this marvelousness that is her body; her body is a sack which carries her brain around which is also a part of her body, wishes she could be without it, contemplates the necessity of fingernails and earlobes. She navigates the stairs with her body that was built by bodies with the help of machines and tools that were imagined and designed by bodies, who sweated, labored, debated and shaped them alive like art. She enters with her body, exits with her body, works with her body, talks with her body, embraces with her body, treats it like a garden bush, keeping it satisfied in its self-containing self. Her body is the ultimate instrument, that could even make other bodies if she so chose; in her womb, with her body, and the brief assistance of another body, she can form a being. (She does not consider much how this is an attribute of gods.) She lifts her body to reach the books on the top shelf, lies her body with her body onto her bed that cradles her body, an idea her body came up with to reconfigure itself. And so she dreams in her body, sees orbs and faces and feels pine needles and loses time and place and law. Her body is a distant echo; for seven hours she is more than her body and she likes this, she thinks this is a miraculous feat. When she wakes she is a body again. She rouses her body, walks her body to the kitchen with her body, to the kettle with her body, her body a marvel, to be sure, her body a majesty of cells and electrical impulses and movements of bone and lore. She counts her dollars, heads to the grocery store, buys a vegetable body, smells it, feels its leathery hide, wonders if a potato is aware it has a body, she walks alone the five city blocks back home, considering only the consciousness of the sky. Dead Finches They say the bird is a messenger. Two finches die in a heatwave but who’s around? The folding and unfolding skies twiddle with my heart-ends, my valves summer yellow, chambers blanketed in snow. Again a lover sends down the rains, but all I get are rasping gulls with shrieks that puncture sleeps as musky as cow pastures, as heavy as gold. My messengers are in procession down the nave of a church with no one but straw dolls in the pews. Birds die everyday. I’ve broken bottles with more than liquid in them. In mourning there’s a need for a story (even if cruel). Words unwritten are words unused. The Play The curtain rises, and there are faux-animals human beings dressed in gowns of lions, elk, cicadas, foxes, toucans whales on their stomachs moaning upon the floor so they sway, declare they are grass blades heaped together, a meadow, a symphony and yes, they are singing singing with not just their mouths dressed as maws and bills and proboscises but with their eyes their arms, their bellies, their hands they are trying to tell the story the story of what it means to be on an oblate ball of clay alone orbiting its way through unrelenting space and what it means, they tell, of how they all lean together upon one another's shoulders how they have sex with each other eat each other die and will head into the same soily, cool bed how they fear and love each other and are pulled arrested driven by yearnings and cravings to rub against, break things open watch it, see it, touch it, all of it, grow, change it all so painful, heavenly, astronomical so they sing, of when they first realized that they could not leave, that they, all as one existed on an island, and if it goes they all go, gulped by an exhalation of energy dark matter and quantum particles and together they begin to act out the end by suddenly spinning like tops they fall into and over each other, calling out hollering roars and coos and clicks and baas and gasps and cries that are human and taking off their pelts, as humans they collapse, impact, all as one, to the stage except the whales, they merely roll onto their backs and reach their flippers up toward the lights shining above, and this theater all the way to the back rows and utmost rafters is silent as a tomb. Shake All things rattle to your touch. You are an earthquake, with feelers for the moon. Monsignori pray for you. Playwrights scratch out the tremor that takes place inside your pen; little things make you quiver, like lost daughters, dead pets, gone friends. As the mother hen you bear the egg. As the second youngest of the Babe and the Pop your shoulders shake from all the wave of Seven Sibling Wonders who came. You stick to shampoo, like glue, and all the windows leak whispers to you. You pluck a cigarette, and shiver in the drag. As the grass whipping, you smile. The dandelions sprout in droves and you reach to uproot—but you don’t. Mama, you get me to commit the genocide. Lime Kiln Around his steeple, a neckerchief embroidered with the lie his father gave. So, around the point, the strong gulls live, songs like raking nails to the ear. Dry myrtle, in the hand, spittle aside the mouth, we forge course through the arching buttresses of stars. He knows the hammer. He knows the bouts. What swings lays waste to things unmoving. I reject his common beliefs, his white napkin that dabs away the gore of his stinging words. Daytime the chronometer, daytime the stick measuring the waves at Lime Kiln. My hands cross the hours. My hands silt smeared and boney old. He harbors his clean justice, his pure head in the flailing wings of birds thriving. I see the dead ones, on the stones. Full of ivory threads and matted plumes.
Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She is lead editor of Green Lion Journal and writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review. Her poems have appeared in Porridge Mag,Headline Press, Whimperbang, Free Verse Revolution, Vita Brevis, Streetcake, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. Find more of her work at www.renwickberchild.com
