Interstate

The sky is rains starlings
in maize flecks and iridescent
ebony cascade with wings s p a n n e d and diving
Kama
kazi
from verdant rectangles, hinged on steel arms.


Signs mislead us, driving into
twilighted spring winds
feeling devoured
like fat worms after rains, flesh
and grit pierced with golden barbs, easily.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008

Published by Counterexample Poetics 12/09

It is only one pebble tossed

 

For Amelia

The matriarch died in a flooding
of the world; she ruled
hearts and faces into
sunbeams,

molded the consciousness of children
in her disappointment,
fixed tears under shy smiles
with the smell from her blouse
as they buried faces
into it.

A child calls out, “I
can’t breathe” and we know
the psalm of her heart washes over
engorged banks of rivers,
night merging
lost dreams of others,

collecting its own story on the journey.
Release,
and again into the torrents
of blackness,
fireflies light the way
over muddy waters.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008

Published by Counterexample Poetics 12/09

Thinking of Sea Trees at Sunset

Small white pills

trick the body out of her fertility--
give her false impressions
of eggs growing life,
cells dividing from the combination
of double helix DNA
swimming in the heat of her core.

Breasts swell forming a mother's cleft,
the weight of them
an implication to nourish;
muscles relax through the hips
anticipating the burden of travel
from one world to another.

And sleep covets her entirely
to protect them both from transformation,
building bones and lashes and teeth;
fingers sprouting like blades of grass;
heart beating as if a hiccup,
no more than a flutter beneath the skin.

Then the last pill, small and blue,
laughs heartily at this joke of creation,
the simplistic human need to populate,
and undergo masterpieces
of flesh and magic.

Life
falls
down
in the gravity of death,
held firm in its change,
and what's left is a river of vermilion
between supple thighs.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008

Published by Counterexample Poetics 12/09

Lost Identity (after Paul Blackburn)

We get windfalls of strength
that prove to be more
                             valuable
than money and fame.

Time spent choosing braided ropes
of morality and conviction,
                                the core
that holds a personality erect

wears thinner with age,
morphs into a larger
                                meaning
loved ones rarely understand.

Pride is on the line and vulnerable,
so thin and trepidacious-ly
                                 walked
that we don’t know how it will ever recover.


Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Counterexample Poetics 12/09

By the Tail

She is the definition
of a situation gone wrong—
body filled with sleeping pills,
Morphine and Motrin, enough
to stop organs in their tracks;
arms laden with horse
on a late night death ride
into the blackest sky she’d ever see.

30 minutes down, rocking
in the arms of Grim, kissed
by his poisonous tongue when she
sees the pin-prick lights cascading
into beaming fluorescent floods.
Faces around her bleed awe
at what they have returned,
an unwilling body and a brain
left to a fate worse than death,
worse than the life she was leaving.

Time steals sinew and fat
until she is little more than the living
dead with pinched blue eyes
perpetually angry and frightened,
teeth gnashing involuntarily, limbs
contracted like bird wings.

She is alive in a wasting body,
a prisoner of her own design,
and I want to take her picture
to show my daughter what happens
when the devil has you by the tail;
when you think you are invincible,
only to realize there is no such thing.
There is only luck, and luck run dry.

Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Counterexample Poetics 12/09

A letter to a real friend

 

 

For Lynn


It is hard to take the truth
delivered at point blank range
like a bullet ripping through
                   the
                  3rd
                    I
even harder to hold back defenses
boiling beneath the surface,
sharp-toothed and hungry.

My disappointment,
                            dipped
in self-pity on the end of her blunt
                              t
                                i
                                 p
                                   p
                                    e
                                      d sword,
lets me know I have spent too long
in the land of the deaf with all that ego
stuffed between my ears, that above all else,
I stopped listening and therefore stopped learning.

Sometimes,
it is hard to take the truth.


Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Counterexample Poetics 12/09

Surfeited

Morning found me
in a round of alarms
each softer than the last
with gray

light through window-
pain, cloud trails white
as jasmine petals
tucked behind

ear and smile. Form
rising; flesh warmed in
cotton given no hope
             of imitating
                  previous nor
                      replicating
                            the future.



Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Counterexample Poetics 12/09

The Machine

Punja looked over the well-browned backs of his fellow workers. The processes of their spines made them look like great tortoises shined with human oil and sweat. The bodies of the men moved with an un-discussed synchronicity as hundreds of pick axes connected to stone simultaneously. It was a thunderous sound at first that made Punja’s ears feel as if they might bleed, but over time—day after day after day—it became a heartbeat that drove each of them without knowing it. Arms swung over their heads in unison, arms vibrated with the contact, palms stung with pain until they were numb, and they all inhaled like a great solar wind before beginning again.



Each of them had committed some crime against the ruling power; some could not muster living a mendacious life style that supported the rich few and drown the masses in unequal rights and poverty. They could not live in that place and pray to their gods feeling clean. Punja had abjured the government and now he was in this labor camp, most likely until he died, just like the rest of them.


He thought about knowledge as he swung his axe. He thought about its power to unleash fear in those who lacked it. He thought of the uprising that could take place if everyone were allowed an education, and how that would never happen. The government knew the ignorant and hungry and poor were easily manipulated by the fear of losing what little they already had.


Punja had spoke on the dirty, crowded street corners of the city about these things. He talked and shouted until his voice was no more than a harsh, inaudible breath. He now missed those moments when his people moved like a swarm of bees in the hive crawling all over each other, the low buzz of their movements, the smell of curry and cardamom and tea, and the children’s laughter despite their empty bellies; these instances when the universe lifted him out of his body to look at it all from above—to show him the subjects of his life’s mission.


He remembered these moments like a sylph passing by electrifying his every nerve. He remembered them as his back ached, as his arms burned, and his head pounded from dehydration.


He was lost now in the last conversation he had ever had with another. A young girl had heard him yelling on the street and tugged on his dust covered pants. He stopped mid sentence and looked down at her. She was drowning in a sea of legs as they passed by, so he bent closer to hear her tiny voice. She asked him what it all meant, all his words of education and knowledge. Punja squatted on his heels in silence, really thinking of the best thing he could leave her, something she could understand.


She waited with eyes wide, lips parted showing her fragile teeth, and gently placed her tiny hand upon his cheek as his head hung there in contemplation. He slowly raised his head and opened his eyes, heart more full than it had ever been as he sifted a great lesson from the Talmud out of his brain that he had once read. He told the young girl—“Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over and whispers, ‘Grow, grow.”


The girl smiled at him and nodded, but did not say anything. She put her hands together in front of her heart and bowed slightly backing into the wave of pedestrians until she was carried away by its undulation. Punja sat on his haunches for a long time tasting that truth. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and sentenced without trial. Now, he was part of the masses again, part of the fearful, part of the voiceless sea, and he felt empty and hopeless.


Punja stood up right then breaking the smooth machine, removing the sound of his axe from the song of the laborers. He heard shouts from the overseer, but he did not move. Punja stood there as they whipped him; stood there as his back trickled blood rivers; stood there while pain transmuted to elation; stood there as the machine stopped all together and the only sounds that could be heard were the leather against his skin and his voice crying—“Grow, grow.”




Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Eclectic Flash, Print Anthology 1

Ingrid

She glowed in the pale light
of nothing. Her hand attached
to darkness and in the abyss
in front of her was Malik.

His skin was darker than nothing
and her hand laced in his
made her feel like a ghost.


Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Right Hand Pointing Issue 29

The world will not note what we say

For Dylan

I have strangeness tattooed
across my Gettysburg address.

I have a proclamation
that needs emancipation.

I have slavery hidden
under my eyelids.

I have an underground railroad
running through my brain.

I have bums swaying
from the rod of my existence.

I have a jagged soul hooked
on the meanderings of a hobo-nation.

I have wandered into a field
of sleep where I never rest.

I have been arrested
for possession of a heart too big.

I have been told the devil
has eleven points against me.

I have taken that which makes me small.

I have in my pocket that which makes me tall.

I have under a black hat
a fear of a black cat.

I have strangeness tattooed
across my Gettysburg address.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008


Published by Hobo Camp Review, Fall Issue 2009

Year One

You dragged the mattress into the living room,

citing how insomnia has crept into every Sunday
of your life and how white noise somehow
soothes the beasts in your head
to rest, just enough to sleep.

At first I felt internally resistant, struggling
with lights flashing in pixilated repetition
around the dark room, each sound
from the television a knife
running along my nerves.

I felt your body crawl over mine, listened as you
placed “We Were Soldiers” into the tray of the player,
and then settle down beside me again.
I lay there still resisting the noise,
but as it continued, I softened.

We watched the first major conflict in the Vietnam war
and sorrow rolled down my cheeks silently
as young men took their deaths so afraid
and unsure, knowing this was once my father
in Vietnam and your father in Korea.

So there we lay on our anniversary, bodies locked
together in something deeper than we could
have imagined a year ago, I could have never
been born pounded through me as you
wiped tears and allowed my heart

to break, understanding
the repercussions
of war torn
childhoods.

Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Burning Shore Review 11/09

Spaghetti for Dinner

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

“God damn it Bean, what the fucking hell is your problem?” Jed yelled as Bean lunged at him, both of her clenched fists raised in his face, covered in rich earth with bundles of thyme gripped in her hands. The smell of it made him hungry despite the savage look in her eyes and he almost asked her if she were going to make tomato sauce tonight, but thought better of it.


“I am going to kill you Jed. Gut you like a god damned pig on the altar. Do you hear me? Do you have that registered in your thick good for nothing skull?”


Jed backed up from Bean as she advanced on him. He had no idea why she was frothing at the mouth and waving Italian herbs in his face, but he could tell she was adamant about something. She had a ripe old bee in her bonnet.


Bean moved closer and closer and she could feel her own heart beating out of her chest in rage. That flea bag dog of his had dug up her herb garden again and shit all over her sage. She had had enough of it. She had warned him time and again and she couldn’t take no more. Bean could feel her hair plastered to her forehead, could feel the flush in her cheeks like hot slaps to the face. She hurled the thyme at him from across the room.


“Your bastard dog has done it again Jed. Where is he? I am going to skin him alive and leave his still shaking carcass on the seat of your precious pick-up!!”


Jed, not knowing what else he could do but get out of dodge, ran up the stairs and hid in one of the bedrooms. This was a cowardly thing to do, he thought to himself, but when Bean got this mad there was nothing else you could do but disappear and hope she settled back into sanity. But this time, his cowardice enraged her even more. He could hear her heavy footfalls on the stairs coming after him.


Bean started opening doors in the upstairs looking for the lame husband she continued to carry around her neck like a millstone. The first room was empty and dark, and she listened for the sound of his breathing in the absence of light. When she was satisfied Jed wasn’t in there, she closed the door with a loud bang to let him know she was coming for him.


She opened the second door and her three children screamed in unison as the light from the opening spanned across their huddled shapes in the corner. Bean noticed how small and curled they were and for a moment her heart softened at their tiny limbs, at their flexibility, at their golden hair hanging gingerly over their eyes, and how they clutched each other in fear. She would not stay in this moment long, because each of them had his nose and the sight of it reminded her of her hunt. She had a fox to find.


Jed could hear Bean outside the door, listened as her muddy hands slipped on the glass doorknob, and knew he was in for it. Bean relished the click and release of the door’s mechanism and swung the door open slowly. It hit the bedroom wall with a dull thud. Backlit in the center of the room stood Jed. His chest was heaving and she could see the tremor of his fingers as he held them out in front of him as a barrier to her wrath.


She advanced towards him and all Jed could concentrate on was the fact that her breasts quaked like omelets too hastily turned and how it would be nice if she wore a bra once in awhile, and how nice it might be between them if she cared about herself a little more. He was so lost in this thought about her drooping tits that he didn’t see her raise the shovel until it was too late. The steel spade echoed in his head before he lost consciousness.


“Get up motherfucker and take it like a man.” Bean yelled, but Jed didn’t move. She got down close to his face to feel his breath on her ear, but did not bask his hot, sick wind. His eyes were stuck open with horror and shock. Bean stood up and the shovel fell from her fingers with a clanging.


“God damn dog,” she muttered.


Aleathia Drehmer 2009


Published by Zygote in my Coffee Online Issue #128, 2009

The Scene of the Crime

I saw myself as I must

have been these last 10 years,
cold and alone, while lying on
the Mexican blanket listening to old tyme
fiddlers jamming in the far tent;

he rose from the makeshift bed, not knowing
that woman, never having the opportunity
to see her on his weekend jaunts to the country
when she was always on her best behavior.

And there it stood in the air between us,
a small firm command with no hint of malice
that stiffened his shoulders and furrowed my brow.
Silence followed as we abandoned the sea
stitched in green and white, opting
for places of stolid separation.

Strings from the banjo and double bass
tuned in the summer air and old folks
gathered closer to hear endearing songs
from youths long gone. I felt inexplicably
ugly in the face of tenderness; always
pushing and pushing until bridges
collapse and I’ve no way home.

Aleathia Drehmer 2009


Published by Asphodel Madness 10/09

Saints in Waiting

An old man hovers

in the waiting area at midnight
with his small, blue eyes muddied
from years of alcohol and smoke.

I ask him if I can help him
and he opens his mouth, teeth rotting,
breath laced with drink
telling me he needs to talk.

He starts with his worries
no one loves me
nervously touching his face
sickness in his family,
wrongs and rights committed unto others,
love and sadness, old war times,
and how the wife tells him to
SHUT UP              you bastard.

Loving words spill from him
about his dead father,
a man always on the
straight and narrow,
a man who spoke line after line
from the Bible in stern tone.

He speaks of his two sisters
both smart and good looking,
accomplished teachers and nurses,
his insignificance apparent,
of their distance (with)in
geographical closeness.

Plastic covered pictures
flipped, neat faces of children
and grandchildren he never sees,
or holds, run by animated.

He tells me of the time his son
hugged him for no reason,
tears welling in his eyes,
rims red and moist
as he carefully touches
them                         away

can’t waste what little I have.

I stand there with shades
of (in)difference, thinking of
stories about old beggars
at the roadside whom no one will help

Will work for food

prophets, deities, monks
saints in waiting, testing the fiber of humanity,
testing the soul’s moral fortitude
as I lay my hand on his arm.

Aleathia Drehmer 2007

Published by Poet Plant Press in the anthology "Workbook", 2009

This is a holy spectacle

We bake our bodies

in Missoura night heat; five hours
holding up the word at our fingertips,
sitting in pews sweating in the name
of our lord, laying hands on outlaw bibles
and underground books of the apostles.

This is a holy spectacle.

And when the preacher finds us
redeemed, he stands at the pulpit
until it grows dark, closing the good book
and ushering us into the thickness
of the south, into realms of plain faced hookers
and gay bars and low-slung rides
creeping slow under golden arches.

This is a holy spectacle.

Standing there, all I can think about
are sloth, gluttony and greed. My sins
coveting the isolation of a cheap hotel room
with air conditioning that lulls me to sleep,
filtering out the migratory death
on the streets. I want to be transported
from how aged I feel.

This is a holy spectacle.

Linwood is empty now after one a.m.
and we jay walk without looking, rebel
drips of molasses down the side of a jar,
and casually listen to ambulances chase
down the night under a bone white moon
under oppression
under heat
under the belt of having to remember
it all in the morning. My thoughts keep
rushing back to the angry blisters
on the souls of my feet, heels clicking
prayers on the concrete that each step
will get me closer to my destination.

This, is a holy spectacle.

Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Lung, Issue One, 9/09

The Bard's Shirt

It is stained with organic ginger beer

near the buttons, a faded dribble
that leapt from loose lips that acted as anchors.

Saffron edges curl at the neck,
a blessing from the Rinpoche
with vows taken to live in the middle.

In the glass, the cream linen
lies old and nearly transparent
against the contrast of hot skin

steeped in the shower, nipples
colored like berries in summer,
flat beneath the fabric.

Pleased, I stare at myself
and begin to think, if I were a man,
would I like this kind of mystery?

An almost tangible outline of breast,
the sternum’s valley cast in shadow,
thoughts about the skin’s smell,

its taste upon the tongue, and then
deny it to myself, grinning, knowing
the imagination depends on what

cannot be seen.

Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Callused Hands, Issue 9, 8/09

Thin Freedoms

The room is gray,

every shade of shadow
a woman can find in a man
present and accounted for.
Sanity questioned in this light,
moral deviations heavier
than imagined, and backsliding
the easiest mode of transport.

Lines in the skin of her hand
show her true age, so wide
they could be filled with concrete
mixed by the light of these blank walls.

She thinks it would keep them
out of trouble. They have a mind
of their own, make her pay generously
for thin freedoms.

Such a word
never perches
on the lips for long.


Aleathia Drehmer 2009

Published by Brainbox Press in the print anthology "Holy Spectacles!" 8/09

Why it's good to have a place called home

They let the apartments go this spring,

let contorted eaves remain untouched
after the cataclysm of high winds
destroyed everything like the monstrous
tangle of Medusa's coil.

Swallows arrive en mass building nests
in fissured awnings and on the flat-topped lights
above our green doors. The noise astounds me,
the screeching birds explode at once from their fresh columbary.

A robin's head pops above the hem
of uncut grass, hunting fat worms in early dew,
riffling wishes from dandelions
and liberating them into the hazy morning.

The parking lot is empty now,
the business men off to lofty glass houses,
stones rattle in the pockets of their gray suits.
They will sit behind sleek, mahogany desks

with the view of the valley unencumbered,
but they'll never have the time or cause
to enjoy it with phones fixed to their ears
and a false assurance in the nod of their heads.

I sit on the curb in the crest
of the circle at ground level
and witness everything missed
on a daily basis--

bird shit and gravel, sun glinting
off the stop sign, jet trails in the blue
and the far off sound of trains on track
that complete this garden utopia
just on the wood's edge.

Aleathia Drehmer 2009
Published by Creekwalker 7/09

Messier 35

For Beto

You recall the memory for me about when your hands
were covered with purple earth, when you cut
your mother's existence into the canvas,
a blossoming repetition you couldn't explain.

Helio came in, unfolded his celestial compass onto the floor;
heavens strewn across the earth almost as amazing as in sky,
and he tells you she is here. A long, slender finger pointing
to a bundle of stars; She is sitting at the foot of Gemini.

And still,
you can feel her hand upon you,
her fingers lightly touching your hair.

You tell this moment with glorified innocence,
taking sun with a tortoise and a dog,
hummingbirds hovering over your face, unafraid and close,
their jeweled bodies reflecting onto oiled skin.

In my winter, I consider how time is the ultimate master;
ordering light at one end of an arm, darkness at the other.
His fingertips great magnets moving worlds
separately until converged in one.

I imagine you lying there on baked earth,
your dark hand resting on the turtle's rough shell,
the dog panting softly in your ear, with birds in your eyes.

You are St. Francis of Assisi calling them,
waiting for the solemn whisper of night
to return your mother home.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008
Published by Creekwalker 7/09

He is sending me into the sea

On the water’s edge, where foam

kisses sand and sea glass nestles
between kelp and littered mollusks
until high tide takes their surrender,
he screams into the ocean.

Bottled anger and demon sadness
that is touched with love releases
and scares leery bystanders
up the near empty winter beach;
they scatter like clouds
along the gray horizon.

Winds cut sharply into his face,
tears frozen thick enough
to bore through, memories of warm
hands ice fish into his core,
leaving him somehow less numb
and more human than before.

Salted waves lap against sneakers,
toes getting wet with the beginning
of life and the end of life,
as he gently gathers shells in hand
to give as smiles in another time.

Aleathia Drehmer 2009
Published by Creekwalker 7/09