Elan Mudrow
Smidgens
Linear
The mist stifles all sound, confines sight
Numbs time, suspends the linear
Encloses you in tentative comfort
While scaring you with limitations
You find yourself worried about the quiet
Near the shallow ripples of the lake
Where the hills slant their hardest towards the shore
And the moss smells of old summer
But time isn’t looking for you
Even though you’re looking for it.
Wild Glow
The city is not anyone’s anymore,
as if it ever was.
The empty railroad warehouses, where…
Romance wore smudged faces, fought over a tough touch.
Now, old bruises, vanished on the wide surface of skin.
Strong arms refused to let go
To lovers
Who pretended not to care,
Who spit wry words,
Held each other, tight, ‘til out of breath.
Such young flower stems
Its wild glow of street art
Traced, copied, outlined
Now, a simple trick
An effect, a gloss, an ideal, a movement
Applied like lipstick.
Perhaps, it was always a false city
A worm cut in half, too many times
You want it to cry
You think you can hear it, to make a belief.
But, it’s dangerously quiet at times.
Night Orientation
Her house is sunshine, a bright glow. The wind can only brush against her windows, slip away into daylight. She warms her hands against the walls and that heat wears her palms soft. She touches you and you feel it beneath your skin.
Below her house, there’s a street. Each day cars flood its lanes. Their sound seeps through cracks. It dims the house slightly. So, she becomes the moon, but doesn’t know the reason she illuminates. She orbits from room to room.
Little creatures look up to her and smile, purr if they can, nibble on her light. She pets them with hot fingers. But they think she is threadlike, a filament, a passage of current. Slowly, she becomes afraid of moths.
She appears in any room, even rooms they never see. They are frantic, almost as frightened as she. She applies duct tape to the screens of the windows. They eventually find their way in.
When they die, they become powder, dust, which is actually scales diffracting light. Still, they want lucid explanations, about light. Her hands remain torrid.
Early Chill
The sun is dull today, grey clouds and a cold, cold rain.
Thrushes scatter from tree to tree…scolding me. Witch hazel fades to orange, then red. Oak leaves are starved skeletons and thistles appear as brittle, brown tubes.
The spring with its wild water, waiting for movement. It’ll run all the way to the river in winter. Now, I follow its small pools, footprints along blackish stone.
I see a little blunt of blue poke through the clouds, bright tips of silver, frame dark billows. Moving, always moving.
I relinquish. Dig my hands deep within cotton pockets, nuzzle a soft scarf.
Lost City
The streets have no direction, no destination. They wind back into themselves, while they take her… somewhere… she’s never been. She looks at a map of the city, it would appear to be simple, small, within a defined space.
On the streets is a different story. They defy the map.
She places her hands on the streets, whether they’re dirty, wet with rain, cold with snow. She was born with soft hands, the kind that can feel things. Or so she thinks.
The city doesn’t talk to those who just pet its fur. These streets run like veins, getting lost is a new way of being found.
Now, she must use more than her hands.
The ghosts tell her, those old, ancient buildings. They’re not as quiet as the streets. They line the inner skyline.
The city is becoming something other than itself. Soon, she won’t be able to get lost in order to find herself.
The Walk
She walks the old road, its surface malleable, as dirt reclaims its path.
Once a smoothness exited, now gone, curves vanishing, the wind, indeterminant.
Her bones feel like prisms, sharp angles, poking out of moving flesh, legs move with assuredness, tenderness.
The road has soft spots, where plants, alive and dead, scar its surface
Not necessarily an easy road to walk by foot. She’s careful. Always.
Her eyes move along its lines, reading its rough syntax, needles, bark, old flowers, wet upon the edges, a dark, moist shadow frames them all.
She places her hands flat upon a remaining level surface
Organic debris, a scree of thoughts stick to her.
She looks at her hands like opening a book
Then looks at the road, she can see the imprint of her hands.
How odd they look, their silhouette, alien.
It’s been a wet August, but it hasn’t really rained, not really.
Maybe October.
Warmth
The coolness of the air.
Our fragile, brittle breaths.
Warmth is a supple sound
Moving through fallen leaves.
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