Home Planet News

a journal of literature & art

The Literary Review

Issue 10         Page 115

Fade to Black

In my movie

the Rapture will only lift the broken, burnt

bodies of the people who caught the first hot wave

of the bomb blast, locked outside the lead-lined

steel-girded and concrete-shielded cathedrals

housing the elite of humanity. In my movie

angels and seraphim will lift only the dead

lying in the streets outside

the crumbling ruins of civilization

the children barricaded beneath

kitchen sinks, huddled against one another

waiting for their parents to come home from work

or the store. In my movie, the upper

echelon of society

will emerge from protective cocoons

stocked with cases of tinned meat and

sparkling water to find they’ve inherited

a world burnt beyond recognition, unfit for

habitation, abandoned by God. In

my movie, these people will fall to

the ground, scream, “Why, why, why”, or some similar

hackneyed cliché, just before the picture fades

and the screen grows cold and black. It’s not

a perfect ending, but it’s all

I’m able to come up with.

It’s all I’ve got.

From the Garden

I come in from the garden and I’m covered

in slugs. Tiny slabs of snot with antennae waving

slowly moving over my sandaled

feet, pausing in confusion at trying to pass

a particularly thick black ankle hair

navigating the rough etched surface

of a heavy Tibetan silver anklet.

I don’t touch my hair because

I don’t want to know they’re there, wrapped in tangles

dreadlocks with chewy centers.

I pull my clothes off by the washing machine

and start the hot rinse cycle immediately, reconciling

my guilt at running the washing machine

with only two items of clothing in it

with images of hordes of horrible soft bodies

tumbling through the soapy water with my clothes

hopefully boiled alive. If there were more clothes

in the mashing machine, the slugs would be trapped

throughout the load, might find sanctuary

in sweater pockets and socks

might make it out

alive.

Midnight Caller

at night the

angry thud of the

dishwasher

sounds like monsters

the groan

of the house quietly settling sounds like

prowlers

I can almost see the deranged face

of my family’s murderer pressed against

the glass

sliding doors.

© Charles Buckland: Winter Trees Conversing

Take It

folded wolf

soft flesh beside me, I

am so hot, unfurls into something I know

 

baby bird above me, wolf

clutched in its beak, I

touch the white skeleton man, push it up, I know

 

what you want, man-child, wolf

creature, put it in my head, through my head, I

dream in kaleidoscopes, know

 

love for fractions of seconds, wrap me in sick sweat, wolf

spit, take this burning I

am almost burning–rip me up, make me know.

My Places

All my favorite places have been overrun

by kids who look at me as though I’m

some old lady who lost her way, stumbled

into their club late at night on the way

to buy last-minute groceries or some important

old lady medication.

All of my regular haunts are being haunted

by children who don’t understand how important

these places are to me, children

who will grow up to become boring adults

have boring jobs, live boring lives

forget why they ever came to these places

and will wonder about

strange old ladies like me.

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