Jessica Morey-Collins
Until the Timing Ripens
I.
Wickered settling meddles
the hem of the midnight watchman.
He suffers the stars their
gentle penance, bores
his eyes into the war
of night
and waits. Somewhere a
woman worries her rosary.
She baits sleep while
she wears the beads
to dust.
II.
The watchman knows the
wayward traipse of the night.
His mantle captures the
inbound road-grit, his face grows
deeper hatched with the
plans of the late freighters
and friendless hacks
drifting in on the wind
from the sea.
He sucks them into his
lungs.
His laugh is a raw splatter
thrown toward the stars.
III.
He'd give his eyes to
hold the woman who waits
for him. He saw the alabaster
cast of heaven
in the sheen that sprang
to her forehead
while he tumbled among
her limbs, allowed
his lips into her neck
for one unhitched minute
away from his post.
*
I wish you were my house
of glass
One of billions snags
me up in brambles
and leaves. While he recedes,
others tug
at my
attention. New faces settle
into their names. The
cattle call
draws plenty. The rule
is exception. Vacuum-chassied
(to stem my scorched Earth
romance
policy): nature abhors
me.
Set a closet at the center
of you—
see what happens:
charades of men
march out from the woodwork.
Notice the bird, the beast
of sea.
See the green lawn, lolled
between
structures. Watch
the fly sucking nutrient
juices
from a bee carcass. Acknowledge
infinitesimal event sequences:
leaves tumble, planes
chug overhead.
Somewhere, far too near,
he breathes.
*
Leveraging Dynamic Web-based
Architectures
A. Living
The machine that is me
sits on coffee stained
plastic.
Notes so boring they go
unnoticed are posted
on the walls and the edges
of the two flat-screen
monitors. SharePoint pathway,
request form portal, still
the world slams only static
diodes. Blood and bone,
mud and ocean; palpable
things flatten—what
matters
are categorical snapshots.
Wildfires, refugee screams,
we let the blood from
events
to render them safe,
to make them relevant,
here,
under the fluorescent
hum,
with the distant shake
of ice
against the sides of a
fast-food cup
troubling whiter noises.
The machines squeeze our
eyes
until they glitter. They
give us
unlimited symbols. Toes
are not requisite, you
can sit
until your lower limbs
turn
liquid. We sling ourselves
just above sleep, shuffle
unseeing over colorless
carpet.
Each day drains. Each
face fades.
We swallow our screams.
We eat our own hands,
trade time for bank statements.
We build shelters from
fibs.
We last decades in our
glass cases,
where we rehydrate synthetic
edibles,
flex our knuckles against
plastic key-caps
to reign each day into
a statement.
What matters are analytics.
Click the numbers
bigger, give afternoons
to the rabble.
Enjoy your 8 days of vacation.
B. The Commissioner
(Jack be)
A planner, manager or
monitor. Create
habitat corridors; allocate
resources
for optimized infrastructure
maintenance; plan
for droughts. Award winners
stand and accept applause.
He calls
the Trust for Public Land
to the stage, then the
EPA. Data's been integrated,
maybes juiced from eye-fruits.
Winners leverage science
trends. Pervasive data
made shapes and their names
available. Agile organizational
patterns
project
bald Earth data.
C. Subordinate
Straighten the legs, suck
a few lungfulls of air.
Blunder.
Center the knees over
the feet over the hips.
Get right minded
for marketing bukakke,
"Would you like me
to get this for you?"
Of course, of course,
of course, no problem.
The coarse course
chafes. Days revolve around
stolen walks,
runs intended to clear
a head beset with flies.
SEE, the eyes scream!
The trees are still green, the sky
dirty but still up there.
Blunder.
Affix the self to other
things, affix the self
to the self.
Get minded right
for ass-up handling of
haystacks, for the whole wax mouthed
act. Straighten the back,
suck a few lungfuls of
air. Blunder.
Center the head over the
neck over the hips.
Praise the waylayer with
mud on her lips, let
the bumble crumbed bigwigs
thin the limbs
splayed into language.
Thank them
for the chalk circle in
which you live.
Jessica Morey-Collins lives and works in Southern California's
Inland Empire. Her work has been featured in The Redlands Review, Welter, Bellow, The Literary Bohemian and elsewhere. She
is an advisory board member of the Wild Lemon Project.