SUNCHASER
A collection of poetry by Jade Shirey
1. Here is Where I Shoved my Childhood
3. Tell Me Again About the Twelve Time Zones
2. Don't Tell Your Grandmother About This
1. These are Just Growing Pains
999. Hyacinth Didn’t Know What Hit Him
Here is Where I Shoved my Childhood
Behind the cat-clawed closet door
where broken toys pile all the way up to the cobwebs
under a naked dirty lightbulb with a ratty pull string for a switch.
For eighteen years I had amassed:
abused dolls with teeth marks denting their feet,
foam pirate hats shedding in chunks,
dollhouses with rusted broken hinges,
retractable light saber toys, even though I never touched Star Wars.
It was always Star Trek for me,
phasers and the Final Frontier –
Lieutenant Uhura’s short uniform skirt.
I’ve done my own share of trekking
in my own few years.
Even still –
Temptation trickles
to the tips of my fingers.
They itch to turn the light on again
just to steal just one tiny
peek.
I haven’t seen these things
in anything but my muddled memory ever since
the pull string broke years ago
with a resounding
snap
and a muttered aw, fuck.
↑ top
Abandon Ship
Friday –
The boy sitting on the hill overlooking the pond with his $120 Canon camera was more of an acquaintance than a friend. If I knew he was there as I navigated the water in a plastic paddle boat all alone, I might have belted the song I was singing a little bit louder:
I’m just a
teenage
dirtbag
baby.
And he would have had something to keep him interested other than the curl of my toes over the dog-chewed pedals as I apathetically carved creases in the stale water. I didn’t want to become better friends, but I empathize with his boredom while my three friends were inside changing into bikinis and reading glossy gossip magazines.
Saturday –
The back of the boat feels lower than the front. I’m framing my Vans-clad feet with my fuzzy cell-phone camera as they dangle in the chilly water when I feel a split-second warning in long fingernails running up my arm.
BOO
is never cute
unless the person with their mouth brushing your ear happens to be cute, of course. Skinny arms drag me backwards into an embrace. My shoulderblades line up with her bikini-clad breasts and I try not to blush. There are five people piled on the boat, four girls chattering as that boy from the hill steers us around, It’s a two-seater: perfect for romantic outings that end in a member of the paddling party drowning, unless someone is there to teach you how to swim.
Sunday –
The boy is taking pictures again, up on his hill. The eye of his camera is focused on us, girls who cackle with teeth-bearing laughter as we try to position the boat just right. When the starboard side of the plastic paddleboat is facing him, we four stand on unsteady legs and count to three. The force of the jump nearly flips the boat, but I don’t notice as the cold water sucks me under and my feet hit the spongy mud. Soft hands pull me to the surface and I’m greeted with chattering teeth behind an ecstatic grin.
In the photo, our hands are clasped. I don’t remember reaching
for
her
but she certainly knew how to swim.
↑ top
Abusive Oceans
An ornery crab is mistaken for a perfectly-preserved seashell
and the price is paid with a sliced-up finger that seeps
saccharine blood into the sea
for the sharks to dream about. They wouldn’t dare
swim this close – not with low tide stretching out so far
that surfers in their wetsuits
are left beached on the breakers. Its a beer bottle
and bonfire night, now. Clumsy fingers of a friend massage
my bruised shoulders from where I hit the sandpaper
sea floor four times today. She soothes me by crooning a drunken
sea shanty:
I’m as happy a man as the sea will allow.
Those hands fasten me together at the seams
like duct-tape surgery while I long for the churning
of the water that she warns me
away from. The currents will drag me out and the waves
will toss me back in, but I will
never stop returning to the water like a
bad habit.
↑ top
Tell Me Again About the Twelve Time Zones
Even though you’re wrong. The comforting crackle
of your voice dancing down the phone lines
was always fact enough for me to agree. Remind me of the time
I stumbled into the living room asleep on my feet and you tried
not to wake me as you guided me back to my unheated
bedroom in your trailer. Tell me about the callus
on your right thumb that never wore down. Tell me, and maybe
I will remember the care with which you handled me, like I was
tin foil bound to tear. You taught me high kicks from karate
and only ever hit me when you were drunk. Don’t tell me
why, just remind me about asking forgiveness over card games.
War – we played war. And you would let me win
by lying to me about the rules when I was too young
to know better.
Tell me about the lottery, about feeding the ducks moldy
bread, of the snapped fishing rods we taped back
together, about the times we would go
deer spotting, and I’d get to hold the flashlight.
If I sit down next to you, get grass stains on my jeans for you,
plant poppies in the dirt for you, I want you to remind me about
the time zones
so I will never forget the way you would tell me when you were alive.
↑ top
Don’t Tell Your Grandmother About This
My dad used to quote Pulp Fiction
to make me giggle. It was our
inside joke.
So the first time a thin-lipped teacher
asked where I learned those bad words from,
I said
Marcellus Wallace
and refused to say more.
↑ top
These Are Just Growing Pains
Said that girl, 4’10” and full of spunk –
literally. She boasted to me of trysts that neither
of us could fully understand – told stories
about boys that left me lost
on the searing summer tar
in church parking lots. I grew faster
but grew in ignorance, looking up to her
for guidance with my head angled down
during the days we would walk on tire-torn back roads.
Stolen cigarettes dangled from her fingers. She didn’t even cry
when she earned the burn-hole
crater in her palm.
The knotted skin still makes me cringe
when I remember the smell of seared flesh.
She blossomed to nearly 5’1” and I soaked
up as much of her shade as I could while we were young enough
to still ride on bikes outside – her straddling the seat, me standing
on the pegs. When the bike wobbled like a bull trying to
buck me off, I grasped the reins and made the choice
to throw myself away so she wouldn’t go down with me.
Those hand-me-down Levi jeans
were full of holes and stained
with blood at the knees.
When I looked up from my place in the gravel,
my own palm-craters earned,
she was very far away – not bothering
to glance back for a second through the dust
kicked up behind her. Chalky air stung my
busted-up knees and burned in my dry eyes, but I squeezed
my torn-up hands into fists to ease the pain as I waited
to see if she would even feel the ache of my absence at her back.
↑ top
The Oppenheimer Effect
I am the lazer-guided missile pushing out
of the twinkling vacuum of black
to mushroom and unfurl above steel
and civilization.
I am the world reinvented on the grey
New Mexico sands –
under the hand of intelligent man.
I am Dresden crumbling like brittle butterfly wings,
a forgotten crater in a world of craters
that foster bare-footed children
and fill lakes of murk and mud.
I am plumes of gas
rolling like a Sherman tank
(tasting like ammonia)
across every clump of dirt
on every piece of land this Earth has to offer.
I am become death
across the airwaves of a nation
and in the boardrooms far from the mud
where I face percentages and pray for
quickness when the lights go out, and they will
go out
because –
I am
the mind of a generation, the voice of a community,
the father of a country, the toppler or a regime,
the destroyer of worlds.
↑ top
Zombie Season
The first signs of nature rising from the dead
show up in snow melting down to reveal
bones:
a pelvis, two tibias, various chunks of antlers, and at least one half jawbone
so preserved by the cold that you can count the cavities
of whatever animal it has left behind.
Black-capped chickadees sing off-key and hungry
with their gray feet curled desperately around the
decayed branches with bark flaking off like
dandruff in the wind. Rivers are veins kickstarting the
cardiovascular network of the Earth, pushing sludge-blood water
through stubborn ice. The body is cold to the touch
as it aches for tributes of seeds. Blue fingers
freeze in the planting. The Earth is a shell of dead
skin and atrophied muscle, but mankind mended cow-hides
into work boots for a reason. It’s mad scientist mentality minus
the lab coats and plus the pitchforks that urges us
to raise the dead with callused hands and growling stomachs.
↑ top
Hyacinth Didn’t Know What Hit Him
When he chased after the sun.
He stumbled blindly
on bird-boned legs
and let the winds carry him west in the dusk.
He allowed himself forget the vertical axis
and lost himself in the arms of the air.
When bled like flower petals
dripping as lazy as teardrops from eyelashes
plummeting towards the dirt, he dusted off
his scraped knees and decided that he would walk
against the wind
and meet the dawn in the east.
He forgot the envious glow of the moon –
her pale reflection left his cheeks
to be replaced by the stinging red ruddiness
of the always elusive sun.
But is something really worth it
if you’re not prepared to run?
↑ top
This page uses the Ultimate 'Full Page' 1 column Liquid Layout by Matthew James Taylor. View more website layouts and web design articles.