AllHallowTide
by Christien Gholson
1.
The graveyard-shift moon crests the eastern ridge, shines through the faces of those waiting to enter the Penny Soul Arcade. A bus passes: blue light ignites my cheek bones. Promises made at birth, made before birth, retreat beneath parked cars.
2.
I pray for those I resent. Will this change my heart? I wear the prayer like a mask. I’m just another Penny Soul, killing time. One of those I resent is called out of a willow trunk at the edge of the parking lot. Are you STILL angry with me? My resentment, dismissed again.
3.
One by one, my ancestors sink into the soil, follow ancient water seams down, wrap around a pebble, a coin, a feather, a worm, for warmth (like lost children inside us), continue to fall through the earth, to rise, weightless, a shade, swinging around the moon. Death is hard work.
4.
I punch random numbers on my phone, try to call the dead I’ve loved. Is praise all that7rsquo;s left when love’s lost? I build a scrying lens from twigs, watch shades I know move tree to tree, their eyes black as oiled seeds, blinking, newborn, hunting for those left behind. Will they call me back, message me?
5.
The Penny Soul Arcade doors finally open. Amnesia sets in. Who promised an end to suffering, the start of perpetual fun? Forgetting meets forgetting’s shadow. I put a penny in the slot, try to find the name of some lost ancestor who needs help, who can help me, with the Arcade’s penny claw.
6.
TMy mask is a mask of wonder. She was so young when she died. Eleven. What’s been lived until then? The blueprint of a life. Her mask is a mask of hunger. Hunger for the rest of it? I am no longer eleven, she says. How old are you, then? I am the fire inside the flower. I am a smoke-stained stone.
7.
Calliope fingers drift through the crowd. Dorian modes enter a dead rabbit, lifts it. Entrails from an augur-puppet tells the true time. What is the proof we have been here, lived? The brush of death from the dead, that distant love felt inside the shadow of a stone?
8.
He spoke with such weariness about life, desperate for the pain to end, yet still so afraid of death. Hope and fear, hope and fear, hope and fear, too entangled to extract one from the other. His mask was slack, mouth open, frozen into the long sigh of his last breath. My mask was a mask of dread.
9.
I confess to them that there are times when I do not think of them. For days, months, years. I’m told that if no one remembers their name, they are finally free to go. They cannot say where. Don’t know. To live inside a hydrogen atom in the heart of a red giant? Sure, sure, they say, why not? Red giants, yes.
10.
The way her eyes would burn through me and my head would bow. What have I done? What became of her rage after death? Don’t hurt me, please. She dances a dance of rage across the wall. A slight vibration beneath plaster: someone doing wash downstairs? Ants building an ark to the moon? Love, trapped.
11.
A face appears, half-lit by a torch. She smears paint across stone. Another face appears: a curious horse. Which is the true ancestor? I put my ear to the ground. The train from Albuquerque sends a ripple of loss through the earth. Ghosts of eohippus curl in the empty seats.
12.
Grief lives on in stone: those I resent, those I love, those that straddle the line between the two. I toss the stone into the night sky and it disappears, joins the children of the first light that shattered emptiness, broke open the first eye, fused bone to mind, nebula’s exhalation, saying: Let go...
13.
At dawn, there’s a discarded glove on the pavement. My mask is a mask of loss. There’s a willow leaf inside the mailbox. My mask is a mask of love. The Arcade door closes. My mask is a mask of forgetting. The eyes of the dead mirror and make the turning sky. My mask is a mask of flies. Crows burst from a nearby tree.
Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing), All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press), and On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press, re-issued by Parthian Books in the UK); along with a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books).
Other work at Mudlark includes the long poems Kill-Floor, The Sixth Sense, Four Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament, The Black Edge, and the eco-catastrophe-ceremony poem, Tidal Flats. The sequel to Tidal Flats, Solutions for the End of the World, can be found in The American Journal of Poetry.
Gholson himself can infrequently be found on his blog: noise & silence. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.
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