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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Two Kinds of Boxes

This entry is part 14 of 22 in the series Alternate Histories

 

A black box originally meant a coffin. A light box was a bed for waking up in or a garden full of unmarked snow. The black box would be opened & its contents subjected to ritual examination — a kind of haruspicy to divine the past. We would stand around making small talk in the presence of the dead & see what made their eyelids twitch. The light box couldn’t be opened because on closer inspection, it turned out to include everything. To examine its contents, you started with yourself.


Thanks to John Miedema and Rachel Rawlins for the inspiration.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Transgression

mole:

Soon there was no way to hide the fact that I had mangled it. I kept going back and crunching it, craving the sensation, wondering what it was, wondering if it was poison, wondering if my secret transgression would end up killing me. “I had no idea he was going into the closet for that,” my tearful mother would say. Everyone would say there was no way she could have expected it, why would any boy do such a thing? And behind her back they’d note that I had always been a queer boy, no accounting for me. This at least was quick. Perhaps it was a blessing.

You could lodge things in it: paperclips, toothpicks, straws. It would take the imprint of a key, of a coin, of a knuckle, though not very finely.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Entering Winter

“I am the one who keeps playing
while the weather encroaches…”

~ Stephen Dunn, “Cleaning Up”

 

Dear arctic visitor, aloof and seemingly
uncongenial, I know your hot little secret:
you love the musk of summer that lingers
in the roots of my hair, metallic fragrance
of sparks slumbering in the cauldron of the belly:
how audible were the noises it made, despite
its best intentions at abstinence and fasting?
So I confess— I ate those teeth of rubies
spilled out on the plate more for their flicker
and hidden fire than for the weight of flesh
they could press on my tongue… And when you
take me into your subterranean bed festooned
with tinsel and fluorescent lighting, piled high
and quilted with skins and downy coverlets, still
I’m seized by such a terrible longing. I can’t answer
when you rant and rave: Isn’t this enough? What more?
Sweeping a boar-bristle brush from temple and crown
through my frost-thin hair, I miss the wind and warm
salt-spray, the way light mothers a patch of loam.

 

In response to small stone (177).

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

If only the wind now dresses the trees

This entry is part 32 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

 

in leaves, it’s time to clap two
pieces of wood together.

Keep an eye on the fire, raising both
hands over your head; turn one knee out
while resting the sole of the foot

on the inside of the calf. Imagine
what it takes to stay breathing like that,
how to store up heat for a whole season.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Holiday wilderness

November field

November isn’t a month one typically associates with abundant sunshine; not many Thanksgivings have been as sunny as this one was. Since we weren’t celebrating until the next day, I was free to wander around and enjoy the great silence that settled over the mountain as all the roads emptied of traffic. By mid-afternoon, all one could hear were bird calls and the dried weeds rattling in the wind…
Continue reading “Holiday wilderness”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Singing the blues at 52 Hertz

Animal News blog:

For decades now, scientists at the NOAA have been tracking a mysterious whale song that sounds like the ghostly howls of a drowned tuba player. The sounds have been identified as belonging to a single whale, who sings at a frequency unlike any other whale in the world.

Dubbed “52 Hertz” after the frequency range in which he typically sings, the animal has been called the loneliest whale in the world, since his love songs seem destined to go unanswered. Most other species of baleen whale, such as blue whales and humpbacks, sing at frequencies much lower, between the 15-25 Hertz range.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Yawning in the womb

Fetuses yawn repeatedly in the womb, a new study finds. The reasons are as yet unknown. Are they losing sleep? Are they stressed or overworked? Do they find their limited entertainment options insufficiently stimulating? The researchers suggest that the yawning is linked to brain development, but also admit it’s still a mystery why anyone yawns, before or after birth. It’s safe to say, however, that contagious yawning — something humans share with dogs and chimpanzees — is not a factor in the womb.

Almost all vertebrates yawn, including fish. If the James–Lange theory of emotion is to be credited, yawning reinforces bodily consciousness. Or so suggests the author of a 2006 article in the journal Medical Hypotheses.

Yawning can be seen as a proprioceptive performance awareness which inwardly provides a pre-reflective sense of one’s body and a reappraisal of the body schema. The behavioral consequences of adopting specific regulatory strategies and the neural systems involved act upon attention and cognitive changes. Thus, it is proposed that yawning is a part of interoceptiveness by its capacity to increase arousal and self-awareness.


Watch the video.

I like the idea that nascent self-awareness finds expression in yawning. “I yawn, therefore I am”?

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Pavor Nocturnus

This entry is part 31 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

 

All night, he said, I’d thrashed and snarled
thick bits of indecipherable language through
clenched teeth; and even after he’d shifted
my unconscious, evidently dreaming body
into another position, whatever its source
would start me up again— In the morning,
limbs aching as if from deep muscle strain,
I tell him I’m still trying to remember,
reluctant to name the same old ghosts
that have come here again to haunt me—
First, the boy my mother hired from down
the street to cut the grass and scrub
the floors, and how he slit gladiolus stems
and yellow snapdragon throats in the garden
from boredom, before turning to me to say
he’d show me how to play doctor; then,
not long after, the uncle whose unexpected
fingers broke into my afternoon naps—
How could you remember something like this,
they said to me years later, implying lies,
invention, refusing to believe a three-
year-old could come to such swift understanding
of how something could untether from the body
suspended within a bathroom’s cold white tile,
climb up the wire dangling the lone light bulb,
out the window, past the twisting trees
to where the thin, high notes of some
small bird beat through the air—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Canción sin fin

This entry is part 30 of 41 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2012

 

“Paciencia y barajar.” (Patience and shuffle the cards.)
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote

 

Open certain books, and windmills
become giants, most certainly arrived
to take over or worse, defile the earth.
Since no one else apparently sees

the impending danger, you have to be the one
to don your suit of armor, fix the brass
washbasin on your head, hoist the pennant
of your dirty dishrag— Turn the ignition

of your trusty, pre-owned chariot and ride
through fields of goldenrod drying in late
winter light, as birds scatter cryptic
messages in the air. And who’s to say

this isn’t the waking world, after all?
The stakes remain the same: beneath
its newfangled disguises, love; honor,
in a world where it grows harder

to tell the nobleman from the thief.
The story that knighted you, the song
you were given, that you have
to keep trying to sing.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.