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Eve Anthony Hanninen
Barbara Confesses Over Lemon-Water and Arugula Salad
that just last night,
David said the unthinkable: Quit
mentioning that man flying into the sun, that wax effigy everyone holds up as their literary candle. Catherine a’tremble and blanched as her white-
tipped tea pauses mid-sip, while corpulent Bridget and Helen,
like two bloated corpses, rise blue from the titanic deeps.
Annabeth raps her Margarita with a spoon. Too much about Icarus going on these days, Barbara whispers and leans
over the table, the buds of her blouse quaking an inch
above the Honey Mustard Lite and low-carb bacon bits. Why, I never! Annabeth was having none, lunch or other; her one Bestseller swung round a circus performer, who’d pitched the melting Icarus motif to his boss, a ploy to mask the fiery murder he planned for his rival trapeze star.
He’s never read your book, Barbara placated.
But my play! Squeaked Bridget.
My script! Yowled Helen.
My Poem— Catherine.
Annelid Feasts:
Phylum Annelida dreams
i.
Broad flesh anchors, like human thighs
invertebrate, yet stubborn in their convex sculpture;
a catastrophe of nurture; fat as beehives. With this,
he berates himself. So dips
segmented fingers into honeycomb: Fireweed,
cultured in her pockets,
constructed module by module, this,
a community of worker drywall. Made by Woman. Always
woman. She stitches wax hexlets, like trapezoid flags
marking claims on gold veins. She tells him lunar cycles call to lick
moon-faced honey from the pools. Tongue-tip skinnydips
like toes in warm puddles. He thinks it’s liquid sun.
The Queen waves to him. Oligochaeta
wishes to be a drone, burrow in a module
of foamy wax.
ii.
Corkscrew stairs wind through musky earth. Home,
only a few steps upward
to the nursery. Chitinous toes guide Oligo
through the ground, revel naked
in the bannister’s slide back down,
deeper, into brisk dark. He helps the Woman to plant seedrows,
inch-by-inch. Soon, fledgling soldiers’ pods, helmeted
and in dutiful erection,
strain towards the dazzling sun. Broken sticks
poke into loamy crust, cast messages, cast homage
to Worms. Humus irrigation continues,
permutations of passage, of fertility,
begins with myth and tree-limbs. Birds
and scattered pits. Bearing.
Her arms are longer than his, and she reaches
high overhead, above the crown of stairs and the broken soil
for apples; eats almost a season’s worth,
before gravity tosses the rest
and draws the annelid feast.
iii.
Faultline: disruption of the connections
between ancient caves, centuries-old tunnels collapse,
filled by tremors. Aftershocks confuse Oligo,
and he dreams of teetering off a hill
into scratchy sand.
The Woman wears sandals, rolls sideways as she staggers
looking for safety.
A volcanic eruption shakes loose the mountain
from its moorings. Molecules spew.
At the timberline, wolven howls batter the burning trees.
Houses are swallowed in a crackling-red river.
Heat sinks into the fissures of earthwork,
sighing, Greetings,
broad flesh anchor.
Woman, stubborn earthmaiden,
dines on the head of the moon,
digs holes in the ground.
While you, yellow-eyed orb
once blinded by honeycomb rhapsodies,
now feast on the ley lines leading back to the sun.
Here the hive workers look away, the wax melts,
all humanity loses in a wink. But not Annelida—
constellations blink and beckon.
Stardust
spits across black. Little rings float
like saucers, reform and stretch
around new planets.
In the Span of a Dahlia
for Eleanor Lerman
Time has you limp on with a dancer’s
clustered nerves. It decides when you hurry
in oily rain, and when you get drenched.
It makes taking the noon bus
more attractive.
Time seats a man with a duffel
beside you, a decade or two younger
than you, whose long legs spool into the aisle,
whose shoulder leans into the grey
of your hair, who says, I stood in the moonlight
last night, finding shadows had silvered.
You marvel at the implication – your duskiness
long fled into twilight. You will ask him
how he feels about dahlias paled
by the absence of ultraviolet, but his lips
are closed and eyes turned away.
Time allows you to absorb the angle
of sundown, the slant of chiaroscuro dancing on the creek,
where the painterly hours gloss over the microcosm
of water boatmen, moss-scum and tadpoles.
Gurgling currents chuckle, a constant speech of lapping,
rustling. A gander leads his brood through the watershed
and out towards the road. You wonder at his bravery,
his ignorance of cars.
Back beneath the nettles,
fronds stir and dry leaves crunch. A critter dines
or buries or rummages before the sun slips
behind the woodsy bosk. Then Time advises:
you know what to do. Step out to final rays,
make your way home. Unlike the years
you risked dark to see a man who flew your pulse
with the steel of his gaze. Unlike the abandon
of another waiting for your clatter of habits
to arrive. Once, you would have
chanced losing calm for ferocity – furtive
kisses and nauseating longing – but now you’re slightly
fitful to discover such amorous adventure
long sunk beneath the mud. Time bids you look back
with guilt or chagrin or hunger. Sometime later, you wake
still insatiable, but not alone. This time you did not
visit one with unchecked passions, didn’t leave
the one without conditions (except to function
day to day knowing what he does is for the occasional glimpse
of the violet dahlia still defying
moonlight), the one who knew
Time would catch you
and bring you back. You are tempered as the seasons
past you, weathered but more moderate in memory
than the years themselves. You are still here,
while their tempests are not.
In this, Time gives you reminders— sometimes you listened
when others cried. Sometimes you left the dark to moan
by itself. You tried again.
So Time provides its anesthetic,
numbs the longings, the uprisings, tranquilizes the shouts.
You pour L’ambrusco over ice, drink and sing with crows
to descendants of the sun, listening for new messages
in every phrase spoken against your cheek,
until finally Time winds down one of its brass coils
and stops. Yes, Time stops at the edge of the creek,
transmutes to moon’s white fire leaking unnoticed
into blind daylight.
Shadows lose their lines and drift
amidst bleached fields of fading dahlias, their trembling
pensive crowns. These fold their silvered heads to soil,
complaints so quiet, they’re seldom heard.
The Sacrifice of Dabbling
a.
Every lover’s bookshelf lacks
without at least one sleek volume:
spells, a sheaf to steal down
in moments of doubt, conjure a whiff
of cowslip and mayblossom
with a mere fan of its pages.
Mate this with suspicion
and add blackberry leaves
in an earthenware bowl; pour
a cupful of boiling anger
over imagined slights.
b.
You never noticed when I dipped
my nose into fool’s recipes, mouthed
calcite and smooth quartz for luck,
tucked pine cones and clay runes
into pouches, then shook out
your many skeletons.
On these days I often slipped
to the back lot, cavorted
in twilight green, my legs bared;
likewise, your nature.
Results of incantations sung
whirled from the center of our living room–
Spirals, Goddess signs, and proof your stories spun
out of control. Once you stopped igniting me
with hot excuses, I swept the fireplace ashes
into a tidy cruciform,
muttered over them a crass benediction,
and with them blew our annals
skirling up the chimney.
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