Everywhere Sea and Sky
Today’s ocean rough-handed,
you could use a bigger boat
in such a hurl of crushing surf.
A posed nonchalance
and you swamp
while paying homage
to other things.
You are a wreck
waiting for whatever
comes to you now.
Above you, fast clouds
sail across the yellow moon,
wild
in an enormous hostile sky.
Somehow you wash up,
sand sticky on your palms.
The tiny island suits you.
Coconuts fall, break open.
Lime-hued parrots in troops,
downshift
squawking,
onto sea grape branches.
The flock’s overcrowded
cranky, but as one.
Later they explode
in a black thunder
of winter crows,
transformed
while you looked elsewhere.
You are immersed in harsh,
violent metaphors
for your own life.
Squeezed by circumstance,
then scattered
catapulted so casually
to a distant shore.
Until Death
When the wound blooms
flowering into its own body
and you enter it,
enter into the hurt
No longer moving ahead
slowly
like blood
through a straw
You surge at full blush
squirt yourself around
feeling every lost corpuscle
as it oozes out of you
feeling every blued bruise
as it wells and pools
on your hot flesh
This is what I mean
about pain and orgasm
we suffer together
interconnected
chain links
in the chokehold collar
holding you fast
to me,
to this raw scrape earth
we drag ourselves across
until we are planted
six feet below
the rest of them,
all the walking wounded.
Opening
At the cemetery gate,
in the crowded café:
a face like a daisy in bloom.
This is a person. She is
not yet white credits,
blackness.
Your catharsis bleeds through her
easy,
like sunlight or sweat.
In the obligatory night scene
violence follows harsh-lit love-
making, flesh smacking flesh.
The audience waits for this.
She gives them what they want.
This is a person. She is
not who you
not who they
imagine.
This is beauty,
petals bright as summer,
weeping pollen
dusting us
bystanders, voyeurs
party to a brief moment
of blush, inevitable fade.
Mickey J. Corrigan writes pulp fiction, literary romance, and psychological thrillers. Recent books include the neo-noir satire The Blow Offand the crime caper Ex-Treme Measures from The Wild Rose Press, and the literary thriller Songs of the Maniacs from Salt in the UK. Poetry and short fiction have appeared in Akashic Books, ELJ Publications, Big Pulp, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Deep Water Literary, and elsewhere. Salt will release her new novel in 2017. Visit at www.mickeyjcorrigan.com or on tumblr: http://mickeyjcorrigan.tumblr.com/.
Fauna Quarterly 