Flutter – September 9, 2019 Weekly
This week, we’re all a-flutter. You’ll notice we’re welcoming a time-twisting moth, who links a trio of sonnets. Flitting among memories, menswear, and mermaids, we alight like Dumbo and observe life. And lacking the concrete of prose this week, we feel a poetic lift guide us airborne. Come fly with us.
"Fish Kill" by Kristin Garth
You were aware of mermaids in the sky,
fenestrated fins swimming by since you
are old enough to be outside alone. Why
their pallor ash, collective moans imbues
few fears of what was well known at daybreak
seven years old. Magical was mundane
and manifold as silver rain in lakes
abandoned by the dead.
"Palimpsest" by Lynne Cattafi
What’s left behind?
A small toy elephant lost years ago
gathers dust under the radiator.
Deep scratches in the worn floor which served as a map,
places to avoid or where to settle
on one’s journey down hallways
near rooms where children begrudgingly slept
still exist where the sander’s tools could not reach.
"She Looks Exactly Like a Trap" by Kristin Garth
Tendrils to tails, they circumnavigate
a naked girl, bloom crowned, against tree trunks
too late. Mermaiden ghosts tread air irate. They theorize,
a spectral mermaid school, why would she sit
in shivered fright, flesh sodden pink, unwise,
unclothed, alone, midnight? It’s counterfeit…
"Paragraphiti On The Cusp Of Living With Olives" by Gerard Sarnat
i. I don’t remember when The Pilgrim’s
pork pie hat & suit bobbed into consciousness.
It must have been during my ornery
rebellion-against-every-convention
delayed adolescence,
the time I fled Victorian Harvard for
San Francisco’s Summer of Love,
anti-Vietnam draft resistance, etc.
"Let Him Know" by Kristin Garth
She will approach you slow
with only one request — when he would kiss
this poisoned neck, taste his death, let him know
the cause was disrespect — damsels dismissed
of his own kind, immortal queen his lips
maligned. Let him know it could have been you
with drips of poison, upon naked skin.