Stella: The Prose Poems

Chapter One

Stella saw a poem as a series of elitist exclamations; said she had guilt bunched up, huddled in her belly, and after she ate, she'd sit, listen for acoustics, chain-smoke, and perhaps (and I mean perhaps) think about the annual evaluations, the erudite talk about her vast psychic resources. And everybody else, to her, was "myopic, moon gazing." But it was always Stella's belly-batter encrusted on the sink on the pacific mornings after.

Stricken blood, Grandpa would say. She's got stricken blood.

Yeah, Grandpa's wind was on the shrink. He'd shuffle and pant.
Woof woof, Stella would say.
That shit was wrong.

Central to every ghost is its scarred protagonist, her scuttled projects, pallid limbs featuring sunken, pinkish stripes. I remember her arranging Stonehenge of mom's butts in the ashtray. I remember the time she heaved the fried mozzarella at my girlfriend; the time she left a razor in the battery drawer; the time she called grandpa an old rook; and her deliberate tells: the wry smile accompanying a fib. I remember observing the development of fictional cartilage about the bones of stories remolded, time and again, retold, retooled, evolved...
The cartilage!
The bones!
Truth letting, Stella would say.
Stricken blood, Grandpa would say.

Then she transmuted, groaked. They installed a psychoactive muffler and she idled-- barking, hiccupping occasionally. She was no longer the looming, darksome thunderhead, no longer the musket of truth.

This post was last edited by jgr on 10-Mar-2006 at 01:58.

RE: Stella: The Prose Poems

Chapter 2

Then there was our cousin Kathy's wedding, when Stella engineered a spectacle. We were in Bobby's Mitsubishi, and buzzed the processionary penguins who shuffled from foot to foot out front, after the ceremony, after the vows. And I felt like a space-monkey, in Sputnik, recklessly orbiting a planetary void; nervously fingering my mottled tie.
Naw, I said, as we came about the front.
Whoo, Stella said, leaned out the window, and pulled up her shirt.

But after the muffling, there was this Palmaranian aloofness, dutiful grooming, hours in the bathroom. During this keepsake recovery she'd eat Green Pea Soup and Chicken Noodle Soup beside the hum of a ventilator. She was heard, but not seen.

I'd look for her, and walk into a room, and only find the loitering smoke of one of her Chesterfields.

Then she'd sleep, molt her old face, and get well. And walk around outside, stopping, staring blankly into horizons as if they featured rising spires of metaphysic revelation.

And then she'd get sick.


And then she'd get well.


And then she'd get sick.

This post was last edited by jgr on 10-Mar-2006 at 03:00.