Claire T. Feild

The January Featured Poet is Claire T. Feild

Please feel free to email Claire at: ctillandsia@gmail.com

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BORDERLINE

She almost reaches her goals,
but they hide from her like
a maestro nearly ready to
prompt his musicians or a
cocoon almost ready to be
a butterfly. She becomes
a recluse inside her home,
her house wearing so many
spider webs that she
pretends the one on her
is the matrimonial veil she
lost to the other woman,
a ming tree in stature,
with a mouth as big as a
hornet’s nest.

DISPERSE

She scatters the leaves from what her
brother had formed into what
looked like an igloo.

When her brother returns to see the
devastation, he heads for the
dark forest.

After he sees fresh cheese underneath
a narrow tall tree, he eats it,
forgetting that it could have
been placed there by the witches
to make him do their willful
wishes.

When he awakens, he is not in control
of his bodily motions, his walking
to a cave against his desire.

Inside the cave are monkeys ready
to pluck the hair from his head.

His screams are louder than a row of
lightning strikes that create
thunder never been heard before.

Ants climb onto his feet, going to sleep
between his toes.

A witch enters the cave to tell the boy
if he will find her a chocolate cake,
she will release him from this
declension.

After he buys the chocolate cake, he
punches it into her face and
runs to the hole she does not
know exists.  

OBSCURE

She never climbs down from the abstract
in her thinking.

Since the thought of the pragmatic makes
her feel nauseous, she avoids its
spikes.

When the transcendental overwhelms her,
she takes a short nap, still anxious to
awaken and create something in
space that was not there before.

Because she wants to feel remote, she
climbs a tree in her backyard before
asking the faraway wolves to plant
something fanciful in her mind.

The fiends in the underworld cover her
brain with peanut butter so that
her propensity to reexamine
continuously will lose its embers.