Charlotte
Beard
Fruit
Salad in the Back Galley
Below me- constellations with the
names of cities,
immaculate borders of farmland suited
top to bottom with particles: neurons, dust (saw and skin),
inescapable synaptic explosions:
The first time I tried mangos
Yvonne
brought them sliced, orange and steaming
the slippery insides of her zip-lock. I plucked one from the
bag
to smell before I bit into it.
I wondered at varieties, Tommy Atkins and Kent.
Over the twinkling cities I eat a
piece of mango sliced
the same way, long like an apple.
Below a farm boy scratches his head and stares at the
constellations
above,
remembering the first time his mother
handed him a lily to smell - the fragrant Stargazer.
A
Dream
Holding his rusted trombone,
my brother explained we were at
the bottom of the earth.
The rest of the world's oceans
were pressing down on our sky
and it sustained slightly
like an invisible, leaky dam.
In the narrow grey of the parking
lot
he smiled and played a children's song
told dirty jokes,
and watched the salty water's
pressured imposition
on our small atmosphere,
like the kinked hose
above an overhang in the dirty lot.
Tropism
Blown particles of thistle surf
the wind,
some laying down, others twirling upright
like delicate ropes being let go once wound.
White feathers trickled like snowflakes during the orange
twilight.
We watched airplanes.
The earth bent under our figures,
I turned to her,
face light as if the sun were inside her.
Charlotte Beard is a writer and learning
clinician in the bay area. Her poetry is generally
contemplative but whimsical and based around the concept of
self and of the other. Her previous work has been published in
New Forum, the Undergraduate Creative Writing Journal at UC
Irvine.
| 