Reporting Back
When the men and women
became bully monsters
backed by bottom feeders
bending to fetch golf balls
off the green, rolled
in ink from the slough, when
few read print anymore,
scrolling nets and threatening
to take it all, including
your baby’s milk bottle
and last biscuit, we thought
the headless horsemen
riding our direction
less terrifying. Who says
decapitation is all bad, anyway?
Those free-floating cabezas—
ancient, adrift on song-strung
shores are always ready
to party. Their salvaged seas,
their mystical gowns
sewn with so much
to teach about
disruption. The merit of dreams
hauled back from. Aren’t
we glad we didn’t
almost drown this time? In
love with mystery
and fish, the hero-ed dark
that keeps multitudes
fed inside the risen lining,
the blood tide
climbing up the ceiling
of the belly of the whale?
The Procession
~ London, September 19, 2022
Makes its way from Buckingham to Westminster. Nothing
will halt the solemn coffin, the queen’s straight shoot,
her carriage cloaked in Royal Standard: crimson-gold
crowned by a hive of diamonds abuzz its velvet throne.
Nothing to topple the stone facade of family, the princely
troops, epauleted guards in bearskin hats and lockstep
with military who wear their chests on their hearts in rows
of colorful plots. Big Ben tolls, baffled birds cease flight, an
echoing boom of guns shatters a muzzled sky. Even the mournful
masses flogging their grief in bundled flags doesn’t break
this patterned spell, this ordered hype. Except for the one
wild creature harnessed to his team up front and center
who keeps tossing his head, nipping his neighbor,
slapping the air with his dark bristled mane, refusing
to mind the taut reins of a master. Horse unimpressed with
the one direction of it all, tethered like this to a map stretching
from a place he’s already been to where they think he’s going
I Should Have Known
The way my brother went on about our mother’s cough
it was his way of pretending to be tough—
deflecting his own demise, his numbered days on Earth. At most
seven, if my memory serves. The past. Yes, but never the cost
of what’s severed in the present. My mother stirred eggs over a stove’s
blue flame for my brother in the morning, then settled in to love
together his favorite flick about the team of misfit girls and brash coach who said
There’s no crying in baseball! The spotless upholstery on our mother’s plaid
couch crisscrossing with cooked yolks & toast & undigested food
blurring inside my brother who was smart and, at heart, so very good
but in that moment in a very bad way, turns out. Understand? I can’t
begin, knowing how rust and mold can erode our most tender want
too often in secret, shadowed spaces—doubt, a dark ballet
of demons—their oily coins waltzing through the wallet
of a mind’s rank folds—the hand that waves from afar but will prove unsafe
for the wrist hoisting a HELLO! but meaning GOODBYE! outside the café
where we sat laughing for the last time, talking life. When I pass by, years later,
I see him smiling at me, quietly plotting to end it all, sipping a glass of water.
© 2023 Michelle Bitting
Michelle Bitting is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Dummy Ventriloquist, a chapbook, is forthcoming from C & R Press, 2023. Bitting is a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and in film studies at University of Arizona Global.
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