Beget this Book
We’re all full of possibility and problem-solving at Hippie Chick Diaries, as we plan to collect and expand the best of the site into a book! This poem is a little ditty that plucks some images from some of my other poems, a kind of a meditation to focus…
Beget this Book
A stronger tea
will carry me.
I’ll pack my jingles into a
book you can carry.
I’ll collage the
cover with clippings of
Moldova in May.
A feather of timothy.
Yellow seeds and the
bowl that carries them
from room to room
without a plan.
If Jean doesn’t write that’s
more paper for me.
This requires a list or two.
Contents, format and an
editor’s consternation.
A stronger tea.
That’s what’s called for.
Stand next to me
and think of tea.
—WT
Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed
Bathwater Tea
Bathwater Tea
Let’s banish Earl Grey in
favor of darjeeling
but bring back the
bergamot when the
window moon sings
lavender, orange peel and steam.
Candles from your “used” box,
red, peach, lime, cobalt colors,
sit on saucers from the
set your mother gave–
If she only knew.
It’s a clawfoot kettle,
a tapwater Niagara
spills, rage into resignation,
passion into peaceful
poolfullls of surrender.
Nowhere to go baby!
Rose petals bob and wash
up, saved, on the shore of your skin.
I know that shore and
I shadow it again
in the flickerlight, where your
everyday worrylines soften,
surrender, still oil shining on your
surfaces,
rocking in pastel paisleys on the
water’s lip,
kissing your crevices,
and I climb in.
I sip from your darjeeling
and it pools on my tongue
and I laugh, still self conscious
after all these moons. Your
full breasts surface as
you accommodate me
and I dive into a fragrance,
a fleshy bubble and a
cavernous mouthful of
darjeeling, bathwater and you.
—WT
Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!
Movable Borders
I have enough to eat.
The news sells cereal
with a pound of flesh–
a charred toddler–air raid veteran.
My home is still
as a funeral parlor.
TV sells soap, the stain of mass
evacuations, walking mass graves,
eluding the cleansing. Today.
It burns the muscles of my
belief. But I never
did exercise regimentally…
I can touch the war between the
states with my great, great grand-
mother’s white glove hand. Our
farm, before the tornado took the
old Place…Young Heathcote Mill–
grinding the Mason-Dixon Line.
It could have been a hiding
place. Under the gearworks, behind
the race…for me, for railroad passengers…
I have known no war.
So I turn down the volume,
go for a snack when I’ve had my
fill–The child’s parents among
Those shot. The distance of death,
Sudden or slow. What I could know…
She never hit me. Our crime was
similarity.
Daughter and mother in the same
old battle to change each other.
Geography the only poultice/politic.
From America, Serbs and Albanians
look and sound and shoot the same,
playing Mother May I at the border, at the
pit, at the polls, apart.
No bullet pocks or splatter patterns
mark my sister’s house. Today.
I have known no war, she repeats like
a rifle, rolling his drawers for receipts.
He sets his pattern and she pours
herself into that casing. Confined,
she swells like bread. The hardening, the
hairline stress, his bottle-
rocket burst–Not rage, not
rage, not rage, she rattles.
CNN doesn’t blink.
They are cleansed. He is quiet.
She is quiet. He makes another
promise, unkeepable. She believes it
again, and rests. And Serbs slip over
the border with the clothes on their backs. And
Chechnyans drive over Russia, un-
welcome garbage scows. And the
Canada geese move in a v
for victory…or Vietnam…
She will visit me at Easter.
I will crucify my opinion to cleanse her stay;
a sacrifice for a cease-fire.
Delicious distance.
—WT
Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!
Addah Belle’s Pocket Watch
Addah Belle’s pocket watch stands open
on my desk like a sandwich board
advertisement.
I want to shrink down and crawl under it,
camping in my ticking tent. Constellations and
bug spray.
Addah Belle knew me. She could
look at me and tell. She could tell my
future. In her time women married.
Addah Belle chose door number two
and taught at a girls’ finishing school,
finishing them off for marriage.
Retirement came abruptly. Bourbon and
ceremonies. The stillness of her room
in the farmhouse. And no Marion.
Two twin beds, like a dormitory, and her
married sister downstairs and grandkids on
long weekends.
So I, her grand niece, tracked in
with pocket frogs, too-close best
friends and notebooks. She noticed.
Mom cut my unattended hair short.
Strangers took me for a boy. A boy
with notebooks. Listening to Auntie.
And the pocket watch tent would ticka tick,
flashlights and ghost stories on her desk while
she advised I could be a writer, plan a career.
In her time pocket watches were for men.
That might be how it came to her. Tom,
the last at bat who walked home
lost, wondering why she wouldn’t
marry him, why remaining at school with
Marion was preferable. The watch
forgotten on a wash stand, a library shelf,
a parlor bridge table. Tempus abire tibi est. [It’s time for you to go away]
But the watch she kept and wound, for the sound.
I was a writer when she died. I was a lesbian when
I found her love letters. I hope I am memory as I ticka
tick away at a career, our career.
Tempus vitam regit. [Time rules life]
—WT
Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!
Gin Bottles
We know this secluded warm pool
and every time my plane lands in your town
we agree by looks to dip a little deeper.
I’ve been marking my mother’s gin bottles,
afraid to see the levels go down…and marking
my skin as the water of us climbs me…and you
and there is the breath-held thrill that fear might
come as a cold current. But not so far, and last
time you dipped me in the words I love you.
It wasn’t a splash, just some interplay of water
waves and sound waves and time spiraling
imperceptibly as we gave space and touch.
How do I mark this?
Fear asks the question. I know you meant it
as another holon holding me against my own
demon towel. How do I let you know that,
even so, I’ll take it?
Gin bottles. I drink too much fear. In a growing
moment, I believe I can breathe underwater.
And our warm pool is space, silently expanding
after the big bang that didn’t hurt a bit.
–Wren Tuatha
Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!
Battling Janus Enough
Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and endings. He has two bearded faces.
Battling Janus Enough
Your arms arch lazily over me like a train set.
My breathing builds but I’m burning coal,
blowing smoke. Our fingertips buzz near, quiet,
a Sistine Chapel moment in the dark of your
bed. You let the last of my words come,
with the same grace you wore to let me in.
And the knocking sound is the
refrigerator, you say. And January
lays her hair on your shoulders as you
pivot. Janus would mutter cold in my ear,
and then he’s in my ribcage, playing me
like a piano from the inside.
I’m convinced we’ll wake you.
Janus plays words without music, I’ve gotten what
you have to give. It’s about endings. Open sounds
in the dark, even the fridge shudders. I gave you
my stories and they weren’t enough currency to
buy what I came for.
I’m humming along. I am not magnificent
enough.
Enough. I want to reclaim the real estate of
my ribcage.
The new moon has been stuck in the black
for days and I have kept bleeding. I pool
my power in my vessel.
I bring as Janus labels me a taker.
He climbs down a rung.
I word and Janus parrots that words are empty space.
But he slithers seductively down.
I move when Janus sings freeze.
His eyes glow but they don’t shine like yours as he
trips on the lip of my vessel.
Janus curls inside me, confused and warm.
His beards are coated and sticky with blood.
The taste of iron has taken his words.
I cup your hand and track your arm across to
my belly, button, cute as a button, I press
your hot palm in and we’re at the controls,
I press and my blood draws Janus out,
unchosen this time.
Endings and beginnings are words in the void of space.
I say it is about beginnings, maybe not for us,
but for me.
—WT
Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!
