WORLDMAKING #1

WORLD MAKING

poems no. 1

For C.B. I really like the one about the marvelous radio with guts.

Three poems by J. Wilson - who lives in Brooklyn and just recently started skateboarding at night when it’s not so hot and there’s no one else around.

My Tree I’ve been mourning the death of a tree A helpless tiny tree in a brown clay rectangle pot Forgot it for just a few days, it was fragile and that’s all it took The life has gone out of it, leaving behind brittle twigs and tiny wilted curling leaves I don’t know where to put its remains Can’t bear to banish it to some lonely dark place I failed it so easily and its heartbreaking.

Searched the internet, to try to save it, somehow, to see if there’s some kind of miracle black market drug that will bring it back.

J. Wilson

Storm we can finally see the stars. she looked up, it’s been a long time. the towers breathed slowly and steadily, draped in dark moonlight, reduced to happy empty silhouettes, hollow monoliths we waited for the bus, it never came so we walked across the bridge and shivered all the way home.

J. Wilson

Hope cramming ideas and desires into a severely finite-sized inflexible box with no give already overstuffed with twenty-seven years worth of forgotten [for now] to-do lists and reminders. exuberant excitement tonight though was deep dread and overwhelming anxiety last night. and then maybe tomorrow night, if we’re not lucky enough for this to last.

J. Wilson

the all important nagging details are veiled and all is possible if only in our over-intoxicated minds. will we travel to Japan and see all those ancient breathtaking temples and gather all those tales together and live to re-tell them? of course. it is assured. but then tomorrow, it will be hopelessly impossible.

Three poems by Audrey Mahlie - who sometimes allows others to fabricate facts about her.

Funnel Clouds

Audrey Mahlie

Driving home radio on.

Listening to reports of tornadoes pummeling houses, cars and people.

Including a mother and her infant daughter who were sucked out of the car window while stuck on the bridge.

And my heart breaks with the collective SNAP of all mothers listening to this story at work, in the kitchens, theirs cars.... mouths a gap, hand covering lips and teeth.

Because imaginethough you don’t want to, driving home from daycare as the eery green sky backlit with an unseen sun gets darker and darker and darker.

Traffic slows as too many people rush to outrun the wind and storm but they are all too late.

Traffic stops.

The mothers heart is pounding as the bridge sways.

She looks in the rearview mirror and her baby is staring out the window transfixed as the clouds descend.

She must hold her.

She unbuckles her seatbelt and climbs over the seat.

She unstraps her daughter who then clings to her chest with tiny hands taking in tiny fistfuls of shirt. She buries her face in her chest.

The car is rocking now.

The metal bridge moans.

Around her cars take off like they have just discovered the secret of flightshe closes her eyes.

There is already so much noise around her she hardly notices the sound of her own windows breaking.

Mother and baby are sucked out with the empty slurp of a vacuum.

Do they look at each other in bewilderment?

Just for a moment, do they feel the exhilarating weightlessness of flight?

The release of gravity.

It is over quick, I imagine.

Like the assumption of Mary they are pulled into the skyand drift peacefully away.

Weeks later I am home with my childrenand watch as blocks of color cross county lines on the weather channel.

It is a tornado warning for out small town.

I think of my infant daughter asleep upstairs I imagine the roof torn away as she is sucked cradle and all into the sky.

I feel sick.

But the reporter sounds excited not terrified and is already announcing the dissipation of the threatening cloud.

I tuck my kids into bed with hugs and kisses and reassurances of “It’s fine,” and “dont worry.”

I smooth the hair off their foreheads, turn on their fans to blow away the heavy, sticky airI know the worst will not get us today.

Food Court

Audrey Mahlie

The food court at the mall on a Saturday afternoon The carousel plays the tune to “ring around the rosy pocket full of posy ashes ashes we all fall down” Like a windup box that’s been permanently wound playing without the words and its dreary reminders of plague and stink and death He is young and wearing cut off sleeves with a gold chain around his neck and rings in his ears and a big Fighting Irish tattoo and my ceaselessly judgmental mind does a once over and dismisses in the blink of an eye

Illusion Unawareness sculpted, perfected.

Coated with layers of bliss and nonchalance.

She sings, walks, dances, laughs, talks, flirts - carefree. Effortless.

Wraps it in a warm blanket of confidence just out of the dryer.

Observing males are pulled as if by force to this woman who is at ease with herself from the skin behind her ears to the small hairs along th ridges of her k n e e s He imagines going to bed with this comfortand waking up beside it.

He hopes her security is contagious and rubs up closer for a bit of this magic.

Audrey Mahlie

WILSON & McAlistair’s