Petra Whitaker resides in Ashland, Oregon—home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Former Contributing Editor for Family Times Magazine,
Petra began her writing career doing freelance work, publishing nonfiction and short stories. While an undergraduate of the University of California, Riverside, she studied psychology and creative writing. Upon graduating, Petra taught creative writing at the secondary level, and has been actively involved in promoting the arts in her community. Her work has appeared in Awareness, Mosaic, The Joyful Child Journal and other magazines. --------
AUGUSTE DETER:
Ich hab’ mich verloren
She tears the moon
from a picture of the sky. In the hollow
of her throat a moan forms, ballooning
like the low notes of a cello
rubbing rib, sending circles rippling in a murky cup
of mud. She taps
the rim of amnesia with a demitasse spoon.
A hundred ants have died in bliss
in the sugar jar, unnoticed.
LEWY BODIES
You wake each morning, one minute
before the alarm,
remembering how yesterday
you tied the ocean
to a post
with a purple strand of kelp,
but it pulled loose, wrapped your ankles, and dragged you out to sea.
At each confession, you tell the priest
you nearly drowned,
how your mind became a metal cookie sheet,
but there never was an ocean.
Today, your alarm clock rattles razors in a pewter cup,
voices ping:
plinking nickels, wobbling dimes,
tossed tokens on an empty bus.
Riding forehead to the glass, you chant an incantation,
to unlock the sure connection
between a butcher’s cuts in wood
and statues weeping blood above the sacristy.
You must hurry. Bury your offering
with the other hidden coins beside the Laundromat
because the teller at the bank cannot be trusted—
imagine her pockets full of all your missing quarters.
Light flecks on the windowsill reveal
footprints of creatures once ordained to number
sins and tally times
you’ve nearly died and did not know it.
Each night, you rewind
this twin-bell clock, marveling
at the silent fractions between
tickings—the disregarded increments, wherein death inches forward.
FUGUE
Before daybreak,
memory shelves its vast collection out of reach:
confession, absolution,
Holy, holy . . . Lamb of God,
you take away . . .
His pulpit cannot hide the blank—
abandoned stump, mute,
staring down whispering pews.
Adrenal grip, cinch of gland,
bouldering into the chill without his keys—
all lung-burn, feather-breath
stumbling.
“This is the word for road,”
and is this road: shoe scuff, dust, cold sweat,
arms thrashing to unmesh the twisted
calligraphy scratching the moon
. . . to whom shall we go?
You have the words . . .
In socks and hard-soled shoes, he shivers;
synapses gape.
WEIRTON STEEL
Weirton, West Virginia, 1958
The men were the mill. Their hands pulled the levers
that lowered cranes and closed jaws,
clamping twisted metal scrap.
Their straining arms and salt-stained backs tilted
ladles of orange molten iron. The men
were the mill—not only the men, but the women
who washed gray work shirts, scrubbed slag
and mud off steel-toed boots, filled thermoses
with black coffee, packing last night’s leftover pork
chops in aluminum foil along with biscuits
and margarine tucked in tin lunch pails
at four a.m. The men were the mill, and the women
with red and callused hands
who fed the men—the men who fed the furnace
that fed the mill, which left its leavings for the town.
CHASING THE BLUE HERON
The silver-necked bird
eyes me climbing mossy stones, unaware
the daylight haze has settled into evening’s thin line.
Moist earth reeks like a bug jar,
and overgrown grass tickles the amygdala,
conjuring the copper-tinged field
beside the shed where we lie studying
the orthography of new bodies, tracing curves—
commas and question marks—hesitating
to cast off youth’s cliché for so much sky.
Marking shoulder and neck,
we leave painless dotted bruises
that punctuate the moment red.
A rush of blue feathers flutter in the distance.