It blooms like a burning bush, howls like a dirt yard dog. Rises like a lark, falls like a kite. Where does it comes from? Latin lovers: de-sidere, i.e., wicked little stars. A bow & arrow & a naked boy. The apple & the appetite, needle & spoon. How long does it last? As the thorn-apple, sacred to Shiva & fatal, opening at night, closed by dawn. Why does it change? Thy neighbor’s wife. Brokeback Mountain. The mistress of spices, emperor of lies. Where does it end? A dusty album by Dylan. The trolley depot in New Orleans. And what is the antidote? The frying pan & the funeral pyre. A candle, a high altar. (Practice, practice.)
She tossed the golden amulet he sent in the alligator’s swamp and watched it sink as six reptilian eyes flickered with hope. She opened the brass box of his letters, fed them to the bone fire. Page by page, words curled into blackened bits, off to a chilly hereafter. On the table: basket of red apples, cup of tears, blistered heart. From him she wants neither bitter nor sweet. The nature of his poison tethers them and they both know its fortitude, how it lasts beyond remembering, disappears, then surges back until she returns for more.
The back story was supposed to speak of love, not tell an unbroken tale of siege and plunder. Not of women trekking back to the old shrines for brief moments of ecstasy while children slept beside junkyard dogs. We presumed music from heirloom instruments, soloists hitting mystic chords. Instead we got Incarnation. Fleshly sacrifice. Praise for the goose and the shrew on a collapsed altar. Layer by layer we dug: rotten nooses, broken pews, cracked motherboards and wheels for steering large vehicles. A skeleton with clasped hands, the yoked fingers shattered. Nothing to tell us how far we are from home. No map, no threshold, no sweet chariot. The endangered roam alien streets, a few days away from starvation, open to snipers. We offer our poor hospitality but they say no. Our safety is doubtful and we too closely resemble the enemy.
Beverly Burch’s fiction and poetry have appeared in New England Review, North American Review, Antioch Review, Willow Springs, Southern Humanities Review and Poetry Northwest. Her second poetry collection, How A Mirage Works, won the Sixteen Rivers Press competition and was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Her first, Sweet to Burn, won the Gival Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. She is a psychotherapist in Berkeley.