April Michelle Bratten is a writer currently locked away in the Badlands of North Dakota.  She co-edits the online literary journal Up the Staircase.

Four Poems (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)

Unsung Mountain Song

If the unsung songs
of mother mountain did shine
like pumping life
along the purpled stain
of the mountain side,

I might attempt to climb
its booming belly.

There, the wind could accept
my flying hair
as a tickle to the formation's womb,
the grand baby, me,
teetering the edge of God's hustle
in a saliva slick afterbirth.

I would be bore with shame
from some dimpled cave,

the evil crown of my eyebrows
atop the battered indention
of my head,
bruised by the border
of the angry vagina I left
with early exit.

I would dare the massive contractions
of this entire earth
to pulse the bare-back grasses
of my dissatisfaction,
to touch the un-plucked strings
of my breasts' breathing soul harp,
to purr my death in gushings of blood
and glacier,

but I would be met only
with the silence
that answers a rebellious climb.

The mountain would stretch
its fat haunches,
eating up the land,
and I would stay simple and small
grasping at the roots.

Wife

I have paid the price of two bucks
to watch my life pass
in the time of strange metal,
inside the free cry of levitation,
something much less than a floatation device,
feet proper, but unbalanced
as unbalanced always goes,

worry, worry goes
the plain canary wife.

Unbearable wind, I am not just a wife,
I am not just a pelvis,
a clavicle, a womb, a femur,
or a damned rib.

I am not just a death sung
in a dawn's hard scream
on a park bench somewhere sleeping,
the dogged face of an umbrella
my last, my last, my last,
want.

I have only lost the drum, dear,
maybe I have dared my last, my last,
my last, want.

Or, maybe I have just forgotten
how to survive,
a woman scared of her own sun.

Especially When God Turned His Head

A tin roof
slick with rain,
the remnants
of floating life,
slipped from her hands
like a prayer mounted from
her chest
(holy holy broken painting
of dim colors.)

She allowed patience
to enter her sad mouth,
her private chapels
infiltrated by a clutter
of ravenous birds,
(and those bibles
would not scatter
nor shake the shadows
fallen from her devotion-shaped
breaths.)

She cried
like a Sunday night,
a secret
that filled the holes
in her walls and doors,
a secret
that filled the ropes
of her sorrow-filled womb
(like soft sinking
forgiveness
on the last sigh
of leaving wind.)

The flowers brought
to her knees
were from his daddy's grave,
tied with a sob,
tied with two ribbons
(a cry bouquet meant
for promises, meant
completely for love,
praise, home,
and the gentle
drying of spun clothing.)

But she found herself
in the crunch
of a lone concrete walkway,
in the peeling of foundation,
another perfect day
in the song of her mind,
where the sky would never burn,
or wear down her intimacies.

She is the bell broken,
and her flaw in glass
reflects no pointing angel
(her lifting
and parting
of a skirt's hymn
was made entirely
out of paper.)

a destroying

A euphoria began
disheveled

(scattered from a strong
handful of wind)

detailed in stories
of the dead.

There were flowers
everywhere,
struck
from their headstones,

eating the mind
like delicate colors
for brunch,
a fibrous meal

of crossed legs
and arms.

Grief covered
all things
like a steady cream,

with death, death,

death on the grass,
and the bend
of ghost knee.

There was a flicker
of hair
in the afternoon
light,

lost in the sadness
of a deep
destroying.