Some days I don’t need a husband
I need scaffolding.
So I can tend to the broken,
the busted windows
the cracking paint,
the guttering that doesn’t drain
when the rain comes in
and all the sediment
circling the drain
but never quite clearing.
Some days I need that from you,
and nothing more.
Half this family tree has been watered
until the branches hang heavy with fruit.
We know all the name, if not the faces,
see the resemblance in the variety.
On the other side we know much less,
can’t quite feast on what is left.
There are wanderers in this blood,
apples that fell far and wide and distant.
Strangers in stranger places bobbed,
grew their own trees from loose cores.
People put down roots, grew branches,
spread the distance between lines.
Cup the whole of me in one hand.
Hold my belly up to a light,
judge my origins,
if I might be the real deal.
Examine my spine carefully
through this sheen of skin
while I burn like paper,
edges curling in as I smoke.
Test the me between teeth,
bite down, heads up,
crack your enamel
on my silver forked tail.
Spit me free
with blood and tooth
and every question asked
to test the mettle in me.
Wonder why I leave
with a word like love
so sour in my mouth
I choke.
Did you hear me say ‘I love you’ last night?
when I left the kiss of it on your skin
and curled my hands into claws oh so tight
wondered who led who, into all this sin.
Wondered if sin was what we’re really in
then lost the edge of my thought on your lips
found it again in the dips of your hips,
tried to tell you, that you were everything
the only one I trust when this mask slips
a lover, a partner, my rock, my life spring.
Tonight’s form challenge is a Dizain. A ten line poem with ten syllables per line and a rhyme scheme that follows the pattern ababbccdcd.
There’s a sheen to the water,
a swirl of slick, slurp, sludge
squirming up the beach
surfing old tidal rips
to suck down feathered flurries,
their bone stuck wings
submerged to make stones
with panicked beady eyes,
staring up at a surface
mirroring
startled starlings swooping
in a grey choked sky
and a small child
with a face still plump young,
trying to break the glass
with one fat finger,
all the while calling
for his mother to come
and look.
Carol J Forrester 
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