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Poetry || SubmissionsFour Poems by Kathleen Sullivan Isacson Still Life with Parisians Up the hills, along the street of Martyrs, men who are women who are whores are posed in a wax museum parade. They have taken the tarnished gold back from all the saints' altars to place it on their eyes and ears, their lips and on their lively, stone sturdy feet. They rue that St. Denis carried his head so far away. The sky is grey, a tombstone new to its grave. It is as still as cemetery statues whose arms are taped with flowers and whose skin will turn the green that only rain can give while they wait for mothers, beloveds and tired tourists. The red lips added by the living to these blanket soft faces make the paleness blank as closed lid sunlight. Crocodile Streets The Animation of the Brothers Quay Light flutters awake. Screws come unscrewed, come spinning in haste to their factory nest. The dust is alive with unthreading metal pirouettes. This brood moves askew along fast and nervous shadows of miniature marionettes and the glow of empty baby heads. The only god is a woman waiting full form in a window, whose dead hand weighs her left breast. Procession for Horn and Spoons Dark men and shovels make for my young mother haste from early day when lime salt sunlight breaks a plate white veil over my face. They parade to swing swayed horns and slapping spoon beat. The eldest greets me with stop starting speech and an easier wide fingered reach. His attentiveness is a shimmy up dress I wear every chance I get. The bodice prevents heaving chest breath, its skirt tightly set, bites my infant small steps, quick and finicky without rest. A Year Without Winter You are a contract signed to live overseas. You are a boat taking me to the motherland in your belly. The waves are mountains, mountains that are sobbing, moving to block my departure. Their wet grief has made my pen drunken, wobbly and wise. I have become immune to the roar of sea lions. No one hears them but brassy strumpets who played for me, now packed and stowed tight. They move smooth against velvet casing. Their skin is light liquid. All of them have bright sliding eyes. I am a man of minotaur madness. I've lost my way of navigation. Peering at staring star faces, they no longer whisper direction, they hide behind ever failing feathers and melted wax designs. Violin strings are better guides beyond the disguising guile of sight. I wish to travel as a secret, as a platinum ring sewn into the lining of a coat, to be cyclical symmetry and round robin hope. Make me a map of your hands. Show me each crevice road. Give me a lamplight to navigate your underground rivers and follow them to their blue knuckled eddy end. You are maiden kind enough to leave me with one horn. I will hold a mirror to your glory, knowing that you will escape my cloying jewelry. You have lost your winter silence. My solace is your crackling frost song. I have learned more songs than all of the lanterns in China. I have built fires inside them to replace the stars with a closer, orange light. Chicago native, Kathleen Sullivan Isacson is a visual artist who often uses poetry as an intregal part of her work. She has been featured on many internet journals and most recently has been published in the Red Rock Review and the Gen X Anthology In Our Own Words - A Generation Defining Itself Vol. 2 You can write to her c/o Venusleena@aol.com All poems copyright Kathleen Sullivan Isacson 3021 N. Sheffield, Chicago, IL 60657 Today's Situation
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