JC Reilly |
Published: September 27, 2014
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JC Reilly's poems appear in Southern Women's Review, the Xavier Review, Flyover Country Review, Dirty Chai,Kentrucky Review, and other journals. She is the author of the Finishing Line Press chapbook, La Petite Mort, and a 25% co-author of the Poetry Atlanta anthology, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year which came out this past April. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, three cats, and a sticky-fingered ghost who likes to hide keys and cell phones.
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Proverb
In my dream, a bride visits
a blue crystal rotunda, where an elephant lives in sequins and silks. If it looks at her with its left eye, her marriage will be happy, but only as long as the reach of wild lemongrass. If it stares with its right, the couple’s first thousand days will be as the endless mangrove, thick with an underscrub of despair. But should it fix her squarely with both eyes, blessings will fall like a shower of silver rupees on the bride and groom till they drown, drown-- and the elephant drowns, to bestow such joy.
Why We Have Night
I catch the sun between my teeth
and hold him there: he struggles, a fly stuck in a tacky trap, twisting rays into knots, like long, yellow hair rarely brushed. He tries to dazzle me with his flares, red ribbons splashing around us till all I see are spots, but I can’t be bothered with his putting on airs. He yanks, and curses, and pleads, and then he stills; it is like an eyelid closing. I chew his hydrogen like taffy, magma a little too hot for my taste, blow orange bubbles that dart like beach balls on a gust of solar wind. He smalls and smalls until fiery fragments stick like peanut butter to the roof of my mouth, finally dissolve into a livid purple scowl.
Garden Variety
It wasn’t that the tree’s
wisdom was bitter, she mused, slicing through translucent flesh to core another Clapp’s Favorite English pear and chewing it thoughtfully. Rather, what was gained was somehow less real than the drizzle beginning to fall, the scarlet snapdragons drinking eagerly, the snake under the rock, marking time.
How the Cypress Came to Be
The prey you weep over now
was the deer that snuffled bits of lichens and fresh grasses from your open palm, nuzzled into your chest in drizzly winds, shuffled by your side on long walks through Chios’ ancient meadows. Careless your arrow to fell your friend drowsing among the leaves: its blood a thousand garnets, treasure you’d forsake to see those brown eyes blink again. And so Apollo roots you where you kneel, in penance for the slain—ever grieving, evergreen.
Beware the Maenads
They lose themselves in orgies,
these women. Feral with grapes and music, they frenzy—feverish, raving women who draw honey from rivers, so transported to bliss they dance, dance, dance, and devour the flesh of bears and boars, enrobing themselves in animal skins to honor their god, Dionysus, the god whom you have forsaken for the sun. The day you worship Apollo at Mount Pangaion, they will shred you into a thousand pieces, gnaw your bones clean for the treachery. |