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Red Fez

One of Cheryl's videos can be seen at  Red Fez  now. There are others at her You Tube channel as well. Just so you know...

Hocus Pocus

A magician pulls an angel
out of his hat by its ears.
It rises to the roof of his life, cursing:
I come to you
limbs tucked in
with misdirected prayers.
I messenger them anyway,
while you perform
with your chameleon silks
and bottomless bottles,
that trick with smoke and mirrors.
When you feint death,
your assistant sawed in half with worry,
that’s the time you feel me near.
And when I vanish like an old gold coin,
(your dirty angel)
I can see you almost believe in me.

The Body is a Throwaway Thing

Curved spine
snaking
through her jungles.
Shoulders, a pair
of birds. One
soars, the other
plunges to where
feet drop
and drag at the end
of twisting tributaries --
but every night
the seam-stitched sails
of her two arms
fill with wind
billowing
over the bridge in her mind
to the sea
leaping with miracle.

No key
No door
No room
No bed

Just this carpet pad.

Carpet already stolen.

No valuables
in the blanket

This picture was in the trash
It’s worth nothing.

Picket fence Spiky sun
Stick-figure people

Nothing worth having

No people
No house
No

Please do not steal anything.
This is my home.

Illumination

When I sit alone
in the light
it is clear
 I am blind

How else is darkness known
 but by its absences

Scales Fall from His Eyes

From an eclipsing sky
he tumbles down a well
thinking about the bereaved,
how they line up at ticket counters
looking for their own way out.
What would they do for the chance
to walk away from their skins? Smoke
alarms fail, insurance expires. You can lose
yourself in love and wake as a stranger’s revelation.
And because epiphany loves a well, because
it storms the half-glimpsed memory, it rises
to meet the sliver of light that burns eyes awake
while the body keeps on drowning.

Because She Could Not Wait for Spring

Brush by dripping brush
the woman laved color
over the winter weary kitchen.
White-winged counters drifted
amid the blush of seashells.
Cupboards rocked off their hinges
with the idea of orange
and the chairs knocked knees
under a bee-bright table.
The floorboards also clamored
for reinvention, to be swiped
with intimations of moss,
until at effort’s end,
the tongue-drag of green
would hold the painter fast
with the knowledge that
she’d never leave the kitchen now.

The silence
the moment before
the child cries.
The stillness in the words
that come out of the silence
that is not still, moving
with the child
when she turns to run away.
Silence speaks
and can stand at the door
long past the hour
that quiet should have been broken,
shot through with syllables
like a prayer
before it sings itself extinct.

BAD

The taste of iron,
the eroticism of
someone else’s pain.
None of it is our fault.
We are true
to our natures.
We wrap sins
previously paid for
in butcher paper
and pray to the figurines
in the attic.

We need something to lean on
and the gables' stiff creaking
leads us to believe that
someone still lives here.
Someone to bleed.

SPIN

We are attracted to round--
hot sun and cold moon
wavy light from lamps
the red coals of cigarettes.
The O is a point of fixation:
pairs of breasts, Frisbees,
football. A waxed head.
The spin of this mad blue globe
supports a cycle of chase.
We use wheels to go out
on our tangents. Sometimes
a ring to bring us back in place.

we measure the meaning of forever
you move
through me,
and light
bounces
from one
skin
to the other.
dark hides
from light as light
pursues it
but it’s dangerous
to stand this
close
to that
truth
while the clouds are 
erasing the sun.

Wide Net

When you cry out
in a language I don’t know
I want to follow where you are,
stowaway in the boat of your ribs
under the oar of your arm.

You crash on the shoals
of your other country, your sisters still
waiting, your brothers scanning the horizon
for their own escapes.

How can they fathom the depths we drown in
every dappled night? Where the day
has crisped black, we cast our net
toward the shadows. We fill it with fishes.
Dripping light, we throw each one back.

MOTEL6

The pause in the dialogue.
Promises made of paste.
How did you come to me?
I lied to your face,
which broke open anyway,
slats of neon falling across
features I no longer recall.

It’s the Vacancy sign
that stays with me, its molten
landscape with the current
shorted out. On a map of dark
topographies, that sign
burrowed into my loneliness
with its prophecy.

Undertow

On the way down
the woman
sees everything
blue swells
and whitecaps
are not: fists of
diamonds, nor
rocking hips,
not rippling
limbs tossing up
fish, nor are they
sorry
for the depths
to which
they have plunged her
drowning ship.

CIRCLE THEORY
You’re better now,
your wounds have closed,
there is sapling strength.
Your sister is still
at the other end of the phone,
singing her hosannas.
Your ex thinks it’s his turn now,
though tit for tat was never established.
Demands are made. Some are met.
The ones who hurt you most want forgiveness
at all hours of the night. You can’t sleep anyway,
and when a friend offers a back rub when what
you really want is sex, you slide down the door
of your own locked-out life, and count yourself
                           lucky.

Line of Thought
horizontal and vertical
cross paths where
the distance
between two points is not
that short. there is more
to consider
than distance & direction -- 
break the line
hold the line
stay inside the lines
but
between the lines
is where 
an idea often hatches
latching onto its grid
of tangled pros & cons

LEAP OF FAITH

Whoever holds up the universe
is blowing bubbles again.

Rough waters, one silver body trying
to rise above another.

Wet with the wash of morning,
I hear you singing. If I could

touch my desire, I’d drown it.

Surge forward you say.
Your laugh is breathless and blue.

Lean in blind, I reply.

WRAPPED

Tea-green rain
slants through the sky
and night crawls across our bed.
You climb in
with your warm hands
and in the falling light,
we listen
to the wind move
through the day’s memory.

What needs forgetting?
We know night by its absences
and there is no sound
but the rain and the wind
and the small click of your fingers 
as you pull the green in around us.

OJECT OF DESIRE

Start with a canvas,
stretched loose as a lover’s limbs.
Primer going on and the room silent as snow.

Thought animates the dark--
pulls back
on a paring of light

climbing through the window.
It lingers on the model, her slip
white as gesso.

A long drought, the sudden touch, a veil
pulled away. What’s between the layers
lets the image live.