WWP3: Possessions, Possessions

(maggietaylor.com)

No one ever quite figured out the flood of '47. It wasn't really the intensity (although that was quite astonishing) or the duration (though three weeks was no blink-of-the-eye). No, it was definitely the fact that not a drop of rain fell from the sky, nor did a river, swollen from some torrential downpour far upstream, burst its banks to overwhelm the fertile fields. No, this flood was different.

This flood rose up.

It came seeping up from the grass and the gravel, collecting first in tiny droplets, then slowly pooling, puddles to ponds to lakes, a river in every avenue.

--

Gaaaaaah short and unfinished AGAIN. Also, way to barely connect to the picture at all. Again.

Weekly Writing Prompt 1: Girl in a Bee Dress

Emma and I have decided to share writing prompts every week so we don't stop. We both write on the prompt, with a deadline of midnight the following Sunday--finished or not. This week's is a painting by Maggie Taylor.

--

The sun rose crimson that morning, into a sky as thick and golden as the richest clover honey. I woke with a feeling of finality, fatality, emptiness. I rose with the sun, the two of us mirrored--slow, silent, moving to a timeless, ceaseless rhythm we had no power to oppose. Padding softly on calloused toes, I stalked the dawn through the foothills. Heavy shafts of golden sunlight broke around me as I emerged onto the floodplain, following the footsteps of my mother, my grandmother, my whole line of apian girls. Between my fingers I carried--oh so carefully--the first flower of spring, a glorious zinnia as brilliant a magenta as I'd ever seen.

When I reached the shore the sun had reached its zenith, blazing down upon my naked skin with a joy it had waited the whole long winter to release. I sank my toes into the icy embrace of the ocean, grounding myself in the rough sand. Raising the flower's flawless petals to the sky, I closed my eyes and sang, pouring my soul into carrying the lilting melody across the water, calling, calling, calling with every fiber of my being. I sang until the sky had turned an evening's periwinkle, the sun lazily sliding behind a thick curtain of clouds.

My toes were the first to sense them coming, tingling with the deep humming that vibrated through the sand as my eyes scanned the gathering stormclouds on the horizon. Gradually, one cloud seemed to thicken, shifting restlessly and growing ever larger; the relentless hum filled my ears as the cloud filled the sky. The swarm swirled around me in dizzying eddies, the drone of millions of gossamer wings drowning out even the crashing of the waves, as countless fuzzy bodies drifted in the foam.

There were too many.

Every year, fewer and fewer flowers spread their petals on the hillsides for the bees... the land was dying.

--

Yeah... this isn't anywhere close to done. Or even edited at all. Oh well. Maybe eventually I'll come back to it, but I kind of doubt it.

Acres

everyone lives trapped in a revolving industrial garage with five-ton caution-striped hydraulic doors.

--

there's a black hole in the rearview mirror
as we drive out of nothing, into nothing
the world materializing fifty feet ahead
and dissolving as we pass.
we exist in a circle of definition
going nowhere at fifty-seven miles per hour.

--

We walk along fallow fields, jumping marshes and wading through reeds. We walk along the hedgerows under a leaden sky, into tangled apple trees whose withered fruits lie bleeding and frozen in the mud. All the trees have claws, here. Fingers reach across the pond, eating its icy casing, dyeing it aquamarine, dyeing it blackish and brackish as it starts to rain, and the pool becomes a drumskin, every drop a ring of sound, rippling into our eyes and our ears. We follow the memory of deer up the hill, into true woods. The moss and the ferns are rebels, survivors, verdantly alive in the monochrome scene. Our boots crunch down the slope, over stream and through brambles that tear our skin and clutch at our hair, onto a landscape laid belly up, open to the mercy of the sky... I wander in a daze toward a fallen cloud, a bit of still-frozen snow...? Through someone else's eyes I see the dead goose, its saline feathers sooty and rubied, strewn across the clover. Ornithinian ribs tear at the leaking sky, the ruined head tucked under one mangled, outflung wing. I sing a lament as I walk. I can hear the hunter in the woods; I am dressed all in brown. I sing as I capture the tiny hooves, scattered limbs, the pile of skin, the empty shell, the head, still erect. I sing in the sunlight to the open sky, to the strewn feathers and whitest down, the tangled intestines, the empty eyes and crushed beak, the crumpled feet. The shots ring, ever nearer, and I flinch; I wander, stagger, and weave; I scatter.

Pieces

Some short ones and bits and pieces, maybe to be revisited and added to, if I ever feel like it... but I think they might be dead by now.

---

And I sit here calmly erasing you
With secret gregarious tendencies
As my mind stares impassively back at me
Then coldly turns and walks out the door.


Smoke wreathing my hair
As empathy drifts, wraithlike, around my head
Dancing against and through a funeral shroud for you.
My eyes close and my brain forces itself clamshell-tight
An instinctive self-defensive uncontrollable reflex
To shield my frightened shrinking mind from your fear.
I want to hold you for hours
Stroke your hair
Tell you everything will be alright
I can't stand to see you so defeated.


We are living in our bones and the bones of our mothers
Intertwined amongst the picket fences and rose bushes.


Am I cooler than a dirigible?


Are the shadows mocking us, or is that just the insomnia talking?


Do I have a problem with suppressed rage, or are the tea leaves telling me to smash the china against the wall and paint the room earl grey?


Why won't you let me be your lightning rod?


Her hands shrunk and paled and twisted and I hid my face so she couldn't see how upset I was; if I'm not strong, cold and emotionless, how can she be?


I climbed the branches as she pointed to all the lovely fruit already lying in the cold, wet ground, but I laughed and climbed higher as it began to rain, and the sun sank behind the trees and gilded every drop beaded in her honey hair. I became a cloud and wept to see her so far below.