Bad News about Magic

The spell fails. A magician’s wand
covered with hieroglyphs drops
from your hand. A blue hippopotamus

isn’t protecting you. That writing
inside your coffin? It won’t
guide you on your afterworld

journey. Beetles rolling balls
of feces can’t guarantee resurrection.
And the sun doesn’t really fail

every night, does it, and leap
to life again in the morning,
hot and red in smoky haze.

You ought to know by now—
hair can’t grow after death.
Shrinking flesh makes hair seem

to spring from your scalp and fill
your cold coffin. Walk out now.
Your dead surround you.

Trees rustle and whistle.
Go ahead. Kiss the ground.
Kiss the struggling leaves.

The Electric Seahorse

I scorched my hand on your city,
stained new shoes with vomit

splashed on a sidewalk. You said love
is a cup of tea—turbid, bitter.

You said it’s a paper napkin
like the ones you tear

with your fingers. I touch
my digital stylus first to indigo

and then a quick kick to red.
Wrist twist. Knockdown erasure

back to a screenful of white.
Pain at the base of my palm hooks

up my arm to my stiff shoulder.
Did you say love is a snowstorm?

A blue sea horse leaps. I made it.
I married it. It’s all electricity,

bucking, bouncing. You said love
bores you. What I ride now

is a hot tide of haste and
pretense, all the stark towers

of your city lit purple and sulfur.
They’re children’s blocks

left to themselves in a fenced field.
They are graves. My sea horse

glows on the phone in my pocket.
It’s what keeps poking into my flesh.

Dyers’ Madder

Poems braid and unbraid
before you can finish
loading the dishes or start

the clothes washer. You have
a lover’s knowledge, slow
understanding, kissing

in doorways, fierce choosing,
lit hearts beating against coats
closed to weather. Your poems

flutter against the cold glass
of their enclosure, their white wings
rising and flapping together.

The word tincture links to madder
pages away, tint of tincture, dye
from the madder root,

in Sanskrit Manjistha. Monks
use it to dye clothes saffron.
When believers are chosen

by sacred experience, colors
appear in tongues of flame.
Your poems sound a peal of chimes.

In your washer, dye sloshes
from red panties onto a T shirt.
It’s no longer a lily. It is a rose.

Barbara Daniels’ most recent book Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Main Street Rag, Free State Review, Philadelphia Stories, and many other journals. She has received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Read more of Barbara here.