Home Fiction Poetry Essays Art
Three Prose Poems by Phoebe North “In late June they bring you here, to where . . .” In late June they bring you here, to where the sea meets the pale colored concrete and swallows every stone-sown lawn. Suburban houses are cast in miniature; rugs are falsified in linoleum; supermarkets are rough with sand prints and at night you feel your damp sheets tilt with the sea's blindly memorized metronome. Your mornings fill you with fragments of crushed shells that lace all through your yellow hair curling limp against your bare burnt shoulders as you scavenge for Mermaids’ purses and fractured Starfish arms and writhing Selkies by the lapping edge amidst the bloated Jellyfish whose poison has all run out. Above the sun is a greening copper penny that you try to hold but is fixed in its fist overhead, passing from hazy finger to hazy finger, drawing the ocean nearer still with each metered moment and you never find the crabs that they tell you to dig for in the pinprick holes left after the waves rush away. Tomorrow evening the sky will run together like water color pigments, rose hazes into steel lights forming a blurred line overhead when the wind picks up, when your father breaks the wind-sighs, snaps your kite strings and taking your hand tells you that it's time to take the parkway home. “Before she was Louise, your grandmother . . .” Before she was Louise, your grandmother followed the footsteps through tall yellow grasses and purple weeds to find portable geographies printed on the soft underbelly of turtles whose legs circled and windmilled when she touched the loose flesh around their necks. She took notes of their biographies in hand-bound books between pressed and depressed flowers, noted names and sun signs, stacked it all between bible volumes on the knotty pine shelf above her bed. She raised soft-breasted hens. She picked white feathers from your father's hair. She inquired as to the ingredients of the thick green soup her mother served when the meat was lean. And she caught comets and shoved hope into the wide front pockets of her paisley-print dress in burning handfuls and tells you all of this while pulling kleenex from between her blue-veined breasts smelling of jean natee and you want to tell her that the only stars you've netted are made from the flies that fill the vast cave formed between two fists and yes, you say, you always remember to make a wish. “You know about bunches of grocery lilies . . .” You know about bunches of grocery lilies and the deck he built one long spring, back curled and seeping sweat onto the turquoise t-shirt your mother had given him for his birthday, a romance begun in held hands the night of the moonwalk shattered windows and the spectre of earth shining in gray-tone and the milk-white of bare collar boned slick boys who will become fathers and fathers of ash. Their love was of bruises and rose-thorns, wooden boxes full of secrets, smashed telephone receives and pink-toed daughters bathed in steel sinks with oatmeal pock-eaten. You know all about the thick hand smoothing your hair at the crown, the broken heater in his orange jeep, and the dark lines in pale skin of his tattoo but not the flowers that bloom in the asbestos of your basement or the journals your mother keeps in marble books or any other habit you'll learn to inherit. Your knowledge is their fingers tangled on the gray beach, the shadows of scavenger birds cycling overhead. Soon you'll learn about blankets pulled taut over the top of your father's skull, about bank cheques torn in two, and all about six supermarket sacks filled with ash. Phoebe North is a 21-year-old native New Jerseyan who will complete her bachelor’s degree at William Paterson University in English in May. While not studying poetry under the guidance of Timothy Liu, she enjoys playing cut-throat games of Scrabble® and going for hikes in the Watchung Mountains with her dog, Matilda.	home
Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.