Rain Chain
By Madelon Bolling I don’t know how to write frost melting to drip gold, wink red, clear — pinging the bronze cups chained under eaves, enticing fall of cold-trapped water from air to earth because there never was frost or bronze cups or eaves, let alone air or earth but in these words that freeze us to them until — a bumblebee lands right here on the page, fuzzy amber on black legs, ticking, ticking over these weed-scratches that will yield no pollen and we melt open in the hawk’s call, the horse-snorting rooster-crow singing tablesaw and echoing gunshot several...
Read MoreThe Flip Side of Camp Indianola
Stare at a wall long enough and it reveals itself. The Flip Side of Camp Indianola (during sesshin) Doors open themselves and shut, invisible fingers rattling the knobs, the opposite of “good” children, unseen but heard. The giant fireplace of stones, islands in the rough lagoons of mortar. Faces rising from the rocks– a British colonial in Kenya, thickly mustached, sherry-reddened nose; a buzzard’s gaping jaw; Saint Theresa in a sad but fearful vision, dark eyes and the open “O” of her mouth emerging from the slant of a great ape’s skull. In the...
Read More