Michelle Bitting
(USA)
The Call
Most days I wake early
wrapped in miles
of you, mink unfurling
from memory’s fist,
from imagined cities
where the waif huddles
in dim-lit tunnels
untangling her baggies
of trafficked gold. My need for this
is great and pendulous.
When was the last time
you touched fur that supple,
stroked the underbelly of want?
Beauty digs its rare nails in:
talons, razor-fine, sprung
from weathered canyons, reflect
grave pleasures I caress,
cast across country, epoch, leaf.
The falcon and the falconer,
who’s to say who’s king
atop the sharpened branch?
Two fingers gloved as one,
pressed skyward, summon stars
no matter what. Thoughts
swung, thrust at high speed,
a rapid change in direction,
tear the air—delicate strips—and land
in your warm world,
my tongue’s ornament. To die
that achingly fresh, called
back to life, a leash, your song,
the unchained route, soaring.
You make it look so easy,
making gods as you go.
In Praise of My Brother, the Painter
How every morning he rose, slave
to the sound, this endless call to make.
Mad hatter, dervish sawyer, a primitive
blur of hands at work: fingers feeding
the dreamiest bolts through needles,
vision’s machinery. In the photo where
he stands, fists on hips—defiant, electric
in his Bowery studio, splotched jeans
and boots, the clouds of white gesso
a kind of palette couture—so satisfied
his look: Je suis arrive, Asshole…And
this is how I want to remember him.
Not what a note left like that means.
Not the slow descent, the pills or piles
of soiled laundry. Not the dog left barking
in the kitchen, the bowl with enough grain
to last. No, I want the beauty, even
his cursive, the swirling tints
of parting thought, the art itself: Dear Sister,
if I could survive this long, you will flourish.
Boys Like You
Boys like you like to ride on trains
the steady hum of wheels
the rails’ endless strum
make splintered neurons
in your brain line up
singing, it’s repetition in your eye,
the sweet iteration of color
and shape, trees whizzing by
in cedar clumps, dry grass lots
of parsnips gone to seed, crows
making cursive in the paper sky
flirting or hunting field mice,
at this speed it’s hard to tell,
our cokes and hot dogs jostling
and still your gaze stays glued
to the bridges, ducts, ravines,
the concrete overpass
spray painted like fireworks
on backs of houses, porches
hemorrhaging milk crates, old fridges,
propane tanks and laundry lines
rippling faded floral sheets,
a dog on a chain straining
at birds as we dash along
not saying a word, as the world
a mute holy blur rushes past us
and you pray to the window
On Any Day Like Alice
No reason to think it wouldn’t happen,
then it did. Fault of a loose bootlace
and slipping, her hands groping
for solid ground. Free-fall. Swirling
vertigo of tree roots, beetles,
of green tarantula nests stranded,
catching hold of her hair’s
arpeggios. Paisley blouse opening,
the fission of buttoned eyes. To fall
and fall and fall, tug of thick silt,
iron pudding heaving as she hurled
towards the heart. Escape velocity,
imploded planet—mother open,
swallowing the blue pill of her body.
Day, a smoldering crack barely visible
overhead, an angel dissolved. She crossed
herself mid-flight and fell, far
from the known address,
everything until then
that held her to its surface.
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Michelle Bitting has work published or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Narrative, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, Linebreak, diode, Anti—the L.A. Weekly and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and as the Weekly Featured Poet on Verse Daily. In 2007, Thomas Lux chose her full-length manuscript, Good Friday Kiss, as the winner of the DeNovo First Book Award and C & R Press published it in 2008. Recently, she was a finalist for the Poets & Writers California Exchange contest and Rona Jaffe Foundation Awards. Michelle teaches poetry in the U.C.L.A.
Extension Writer’s Program, at Twin Towers prison with a grant from Poets & Writers Magazine and is proud to be an active California Poet in the Schools. She recently won her second book award from Sacramento Poetry Center. They will publish her latest manuscript titled, Notes to the Beloved due out in 2012.
Michelle was also a first place winner in the recent Beyond Baroque Poetry Award. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon.