Issue 3:2 | Poetry | Joanna Knowles

Two Poems by Joanna Knowles

GREASE

Two weeks ago...

I saw an old smoking friend at the downtown hippy festival and we lingered over tasty

memories of warm red wine and hot jazz and cool young swaying hips.

Chuckling at our luck the fuzzy night we stumbled blind drunk lost through the wide

echoing slums of the big easy unharmed.

We slapped our white thighs and wiped our crowing eyes over the David Lynch incident

with the matted psychic who saged into your sweaty palm and oracled your cancerous lung death while your other blatant hand palmed your toxic camels,

How you yelled about fraud and tourist abuse and wouldn’t hand the greasy twenty

and how he thundering threatened devil eyes and I skin crawling jumped

And we panicked ran clasped smoking hands through the tenor and bass of the Cajun

streets from the Creole witches thinking the famous voodoo graveyard and Lestat and the shrunken head .

We slowed over the tender witnessing of the painted midget embracing the sobbing

subtle drag queen and outside the little brown boys banging stained buckets and dingy pots with all the fire of their big souls and all the rhythm of the tocking universe.

We hushed when we got to the unspeakable afternoons of the slow sweating salty pools

of timeless hour and another and one more daylight sub-sea-level fucking.

The pale hollow hippy festival waned and we ended our warm meandering knowing

our futures no longer lingered entwined,

And we wound it up thinking of our stable homes and our loving wives waiting and we

kindly lied maybe we’ll go again next year.

Last night...

The nagging guilt I never felt about the polite lie assuages, we’ll not be caravanning to

New Orleans this spring you at the wheel and my feet out the window with the smoke.

My laughing lover won’t ride the cool saxophone’s haunting notes with her strong wild

hips and loving thighs sloshing her warm burgundy wine onto the hot bourbon streets.

Because...

We spent our greasy green on conquering deserts and stealing Arab oil angering our

friends flattening foreign cities starving brown children of raped fathers and unphotographed mothers, and the greasy green didn’t stretch past the murder to reach the rusting levees.

And the sea is hot from our oil addiction and it swirled and swelled as hot seas do and it

smashed into that sweltering blue city as we knew it would and still it stood,

dripping powerful black cajun roots solid.

It survived the storm, and then the neglected levees burst as we knew they would and the

great lake met the great river and the great sea and they poured into our new Atlantis swallowing happy streets of divine brown boys banging stained buckets.

And rotting grandma corpses float with human waste and shrunken iguana skulls and

slosh into kitty cat claws and rat jaws and Anderson Cooper buoys above reporting

newborn disease.

And in the sunken city is an island of stranded beautiful black bodies souls backboning

our culture still, just short on greasy green

And the well-fed guard stands riffle armed stiff before the abandoned store while across

the street they die on their kitchen floors of thirst and capitalism

In God We Trust on the abundance of this country feeding our arrogant greedy holy war

and my well-off white greasy guilt will never wane and even my sorrow is thin and pale.

Metavillanelle

Poems are the wild remains of something once

useful, something outgrown, the remnants of

breaking and sealing and leaving behind.

Like clam, conch, or egg shells, and coyote, bear, or bat scat,

like sun-bleached starfish arms and gecko tails,

poems are the wild remains,

the delicate relics of shattered Beings patched, agonizing

creations dropped. Chorion, eaten or buried--

breaking and sealing and leaving behind.

Like fur-tufts shorn in the spring time,

like those same coats lining soft nests,

poems are the wild remains.

Like discarded antlers, snakeskins, and cocoons,

like bloom-bursts from pruning scars,

breaking and healing and leaving behind.

Like the great-horned owl’s outgrown feather--

useful again because you stopped to pick it up.

Poems are the wild remains, the testimony of

breaking and sealing and leaving behind.