Galileo

Before I ever met you
I’d spend entire days
perched on building ledges
and standing at front doors
Of potential dates and mates
Too scared to walk in or fly off
Like a broken gargoyle
Peeing down its leg
Incapable of warding off
even my weakest demons

Like all the famous
astronauts and astronomers
who spent days peering at the heavens
I’ve stared too long at the stars
orbiting inside your baby blues,
to no longer deny that God exists
I’ve adored them in all their phases
Like when we drank, when we cried
When we laughed at their gods
When we chanted to ours
And how they danced
When we made love
I watched them fall asleep holding
My kitty’s purr next to your chest
I still remember their sparkle
when you took my hand
and jumped off the edge
Into oblivion with mine

I obsessed with how the concrete
Will feel at terminal velocity
And how women in navy dresses
Wearing crooked, mottled hats
And crows in business casual attire
Will flock and point fingers,
phones, and beaks at me
As my guts, heresy
and brains seeped out
You didn’t talk me down
Or notice my clipped wings
Instead you pulled me closer
Even after I told you I cheated

Five years in the grand suicide
Under the trials of gravity
I came to believe in infinity
and that there was no end
But like a tap on the shoulder
After just shooting up
The austerity of landing abruptly
came courtesy of Newton’s 3rd Law
I watched you drive away and over
my rived faith in a rented U-haul
Its ventricles, aortas, and nebulae
tamped into a beautiful stellar constellation
Plotted out on an asphalt map
A daguerrotype and testament
published posthumously
Of my true love to thee

The Staggering Marionette

If my poems had lips they’d hide away in your pout like secret honey
A whispered cache of melody dripping away in a sea of awkward noise

If my poems had balls they wouldn’t be poems at all but skinny dogs
fighting in streets running rabid, their ribs jutting out with fangs bared

If my poems had spines they’d rattle inside snake eyed canyons
Ancient fork tongued slithering duets between hunter and the hunted

If my poems had throats they’d scream til my lungs flooded with blood
Coughing up bad metaphors, non sequiturs and your final kiss
I can still taste it. In thunderstorms. When I think of wolves

If my poems had fingertips they’d rake into your back
Scrawling out a love note just after you came
as you carve out the word goodbye into mine

If my poems had wings they’d be matte black feathery thieves
Snatching up all your keepsakes and shiny troves of treasure
I’d wear your rusty hearts around my claws and caws
And decorate my nest with your rings, vows and lockets

If my poems had stomachs they be distended, swollen and starving
like an Appalachian black bear waking up from its long winter repose

If my poem was you then there would be a long line of past readers
Still searching for the stanzas to fill the absence of your missing words

If my poems could smile they’d swallow up all the sorrow and grief
Lying shipwrecked. Forgotten. Reclaimed under ocean tide

If my poems were hands they’d bleed rivers of stigmata. Noble martyrs
Fallen heir to the holy dance of mountain rock sky dirt and sea
Fallen heiress whom ripped off wings. Whom cut the ropes.
Her birdsong clutching its severed placenta, gently pleading

Come home.

Like The Insides Of A Piano

I am the knotted insides of a piano
I sound how my guts are strung up
Sometimes elegant like the way antelope run
Or a wand of winter sculpting snow into drifts
Sometimes awful like bones snapping under flesh
Lost in mazes, squished under moving coffin lids
Rushing aimlessly, belching dinosaur dreams
Like antediluvian chants that never found their god
Or even a safe place or the right body to take respite
Or like the sound from a dying rabbit when I was 8
After my cousin crushed its skull against a fence post
Out of tune and off time and out of pace and place

I am the frayed insides of a broken piano
Once upon a midsummer’s still of the night
My pianist was a rapist with a gun to my back
My fall board breached and my lid forced ajar
I heard the ghouls’ smiles shuffling in the black
Clamoring for a first row seat in this dimly lit lot
Maybe if I lied perfectly still he will be done quick
I focused on just keeping it together for a better time
But instead I laughed through his impromptu piece
I wanted to turn his moonlight sonata into rhapsody
Or strike a wonky note consistently sharp or flat
Into anything else or just something unplayable

I am the insides of a lavish spruce grand piano
Resonating clouds purring across my electric sky
Despite feeling like a moving target or a statistic
I smile. I am not what you think I am or what I do
Both my names are prisons, rooms I can not leave
“Tranny” is probably what you are thinking anyways
I am the insides of a goddess glowing like the moon
Her voice coaxed out a naked raw no longer afraid
I can’t help it if my audience doesn’t get it or can’t hear
I play through the hisses, boos and the genuine applause
I’m the bridges, tuning pins and agraffs of a concert piano
Orchestrated and hidden like a soft serenade in the dark

How Much Does A Shadow Weigh?

How much does a shadow weigh?
That it binds the sun to shade?
Veiling prayers of widow and bride
Whispered like poppies from graves

How much strength mustered in hope
To flutter from Indra’s ashen clouds?
Past viscid spidering nets of doubt
And emerge into clear blue skies?

How long does it take for love?
The day never lasts for too long
Though each breath yearns to stay
Moments whipsaw us farther along

How much force does beauty exert?
It burns the hands that hold it too close
A cornered temptress in snowy meadows
Limping moonlit proof her garden remains



Words: Cara Feral
Photo: Les Piccolo

Something Precious

He comes to me feral with shadowy starving whispers
Tiptoeing across bare legged flits of murmured rendezvous
Skulking lightly upon creaking planks of wincing willow trees
And dead bark festooned upon lodgepole pine and guts of yew

Our age old dance of entangled limbs and Luna’s cast caught
Aposematic called bluff, flushed spades take two queens lost
Aureate autumnal bounty gathered upon antlered crown
Tickled tummies of amaranthine burst lupine fade into frost

I take refuge in curled chestnut tails of foxes and aspen copses
Tumbling down clumsy fawning first stanced awkward prance
My fear for him grew asymptotically almost fully but not quite
Maybe we were lovers, perhaps in another life and circumstance

Winter coats brandish bled fur and first snow blown freeze
I feel the moon mourn me inside my nautilus trellised hunch
Paint your music across my spiraling double stranded sequence
Let’s drink our Rubicon, hold our noses, jump and spit this plunge

Eventually the sum of infinity catches up to my panting Achilles
The wolf closes, encircles by halving Zeno’s paradox striking distance
Something precious like a final breath betwixt time’s pendent jaws
My single bleated prayer offered up as a lamb just before his pounce


Words By: Cara Feral
Art: Shanna Trumbly