poetry

Painted Chickens

/ stephanielharper / 7 Comments

 

Painted Chickens

Twenty years ago
I received a birthday gift
from a close college buddy-slash-sometime lover
(What on earth were we thinking?).
Back then, our past was already in the past
& twenty-four was already not young.
He gave me a coffee mug
covered in chickens—

yes, painted chickens—

three plump specimens posed around the outside,
& one that looks like an index finger
with an eye, a comb, a beak, & a wattle,
slapped onto the bottom.

How, I can’t fathom,
but my friend knew that those chickens
with their orange-red, expressionistic bodies
would be a boat-floater for me—

the one time I had slept with him
had been an epic shipwreck,
with a silent drive to the airport in its wake;

on the way, we choked down pancakes,
& I stifled sobs in my coffee,
averting my eyes
from the helpless horror in his.
I then flew off into the wild, wide sky,
bewildered, drowning.

Somehow, for years to come,
his southern gentlemanly charms
still served to allure:
he kept his promise to write
& took pains to catalogue for me
the details of his worldly escapades
& various, accompanying sexual conquests,
always making sure to emphasize
the ways in which they were hot for him,
so as to prove those trysts’ relative rightness.

Then, years later, for my birthday,
came the unexplainably gratifying
chicken cup.

Still burning hot
& feathered in their chili-pepper red,
royal purple & verdant green cloaks,
my static & impossibly happy
aphrodisiac chickens
blush like lovers on a Grecian urn;
clucking, urgent.

My southern gent,
now so long ago flown from this callous coop,
wooed another & had his own brood,
as, in due course, did I,
but the mug, no worse for wear, remains
a spectacular feature—
like a bright birthday piñata
(with its promise of sweet reward)—
of my sacred morning ritual.

These chickens,
still ecstatically surprised,
letting out unabashed, open-beaked caterwauls,
adorn my most aged & prized coffee mug;

a vessel, perfectly-sized,
it cups its contents so adoringly,
fiercely,
like an egg enveloping its cache of gold,
as I take privileged sips.

The big chicken on the left
might actually be a rooster,

& that one on the bottom,
a middle finger.

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

“Painted Chickens” appears in my new chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament, scheduled for release in March 2019. If you like what you’ve seen so far, please take advantage of Main Street Rag Publishing Company’s fantastic pre-order sales offer of $6.50 per copy while it lasts, and feel great about your generous support of this enormously grateful poet! 

Place your order HERE today! 

To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow

/ stephanielharper / 2 Comments

“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” appears in my new chapbook forthcoming in March from Main Street Rag: The Death’s-Head’s Testament<<Available here for pre-order purchase for the fantastic price of $6.50/copy! 

White-throated_Sparrow_Audubon
To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow

_____in my driveway:
Would you at least do me the courtesy
of an explanation?

What’s with your belly-mound-
cenotaph-arisen-from-the-stony-gloom
spiel?  And why

this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose

of a napping cherub,
as if you didn’t believe
you were still reaching for the clouds?

_____I mean,
was your plump little belly’s
sky tribute supposed to un-stone the gloom

underfoot (as if
your heavenward-splayed
finger-knobs, all ruddy-bottomed

like a napping cherub,
never knew their very purpose
was reaching for the clouds)?

The spectacle of your tiny black
lids pressed shut in sudden,
brutal resignation to croaking

_____underfoot (even
consecrated by such skyward-clasping,
ruddy-bottomed branchlessness)

hardly passes for
transubstantiation…  Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in

the spectacle of black-faced
brutality’s sudden,
penitent resignation to permanent blindness

for stealing a glimpse
of the sun?  Besides, adaptive
hydrophobia á la iridescent feather-sheath

_____hardly passes for
transubstantiation…  Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in

this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose

of a dead sun-god, as if iridescence
were designed expressly for
stealing a glimpse of the afterlife

in my driveway?
All right, buddy, just do me this one favor:
Spare me, would you?

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Napping Cherub

“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” was first published in slightly different form in  Underfoot Poetry. Thank you to editors Daniel Paul Marshall and Time Miller — both fabulous poets in their own right! — for selecting this piece. 

On Robert Okaji’s I Have a Bird to Whistle

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I had the great honor and privilege of previewing and writing the following blurb for the back cover of Robert Okaji’s newest chapbook, I Have a Bird to Whistle (Luminous Press):

In I Have a Bird to Whistle, Robert Okaji masterfully constructs a universe of incisively beautiful sensory observations, in which the poet lives at the crux—owns and revels in the “life energy” of the “liminal”—between “unshuttered” stimuli and the “concealed” truth of existence. Here, where every ray of light shed on an otherwise “transitory” moment celebrates the gift of consciousness, and every deviation from expectation substantiates the self-actualizing force of human will, the language of poetry—of colors, sounds, and symbols—circumscribes our very being, as it drives our search for meaning. As nuanced as they are bold and delectable, these poems are utterly human, and utterly divine!

– Stephanie L. Harper, author of This Being Done and The Death’s-Head’s Testament.

In short, this is a reading experience like no other, that you simply don’t want to miss!

U.S. Residents can purchase I Have a Bird to Whistle HERE for the fantastic price of $7.50/copy, shipping included. Non-U.S. purchasers can order directly from Robert by emailing aBirdtoWhistle@yahoo.com.

Live Feed from the SW Florida Eagle Cam

/ stephanielharper / 4 Comments

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Live Feed from the SW Florida Eagle Cam
For E9, Born December 31, 2016

1.

Everything
must first have been

a nameless billowing
in the silent house

of before     until its voice
yolk-forged     could wrest

a pyroclastic mouth
sufficient to speak birth’s

dialect of brokenness

2.

I watched the possibility of you
cradled sixty feet high in a Slash Pine

become a five-day-old
white fluff-bundle of spunk

& open-beaked ferocity     You
command the ripping impulse

that strips off the fish’s silver skin
midriff to tail     with one     swift

grip & flexion     exposing
the host’s fleshy glisten

of lipid-pink life to be flaked
& held to your tiny maw’s tip

3.

Before this feeding     I think
nothing had yet been born

whose name was Tenderness—

no one to bring this warmth
of tastes & swallows growing ever

heavier in your belly & on your lids
to bear you to your imperative sleep:

Dream     Little One     in the haven
of your father’s stalwart breast!

Dream of wings outstretched
on the azure’s salt-breath!

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

“Live Feed from the SW Florida Eagle Cam” was first published in the Winter 2017 issue of The Ibis Head Review, and appears in my first chapbook, THIS BEING DONE. If you enjoy my poetry on this blog, you might also consider checking out my newest chapbook, THE DEATH’S-HEAD’S TESTAMENT, scheduled for release by Main Street Rag in March 2019, and available for pre-order sales NOW for a huge discount at $6.50 per copy!

I’M SO VERY GRATEFUL TO OUR COMMUNITY ON WORDPRESS FOR ALL YOUR AMAZING FEEDBACK, SUPPORT, AND FRIENDSHIP! MY LIFE AND MY POETRY WOULDN’T BE THE SAME WITHOUT YOU!

*I’ve been following parents extraordinaire, Harriet and M-15, and their gorgeous eaglets for three seasons now. Check out the stupendous progress being made minute to minute by this year’s little dinosaur siblings, E12 and E13 on the SW Florida Eagle Cam!

Psychedelic

/ stephanielharper / 7 Comments
Psychedelic 

because     suddenly     you see
the whole universe is yet to be
uncovered     you lift

the lid & add precisely one and a half
teaspoons of photons to the black vat
of atoms nattering themselves into a froth—

& because with the heat they generate
you could boil
an egg (such as     say
the calcium-bound     alimentary plasma
of an embryonic chicken
or even one of the kiln-fired variety
that you might decide to glaze
with a tie-dye motif from the invisible
light spectrum     cajoling it to appear
indiscriminate)—

the dense infinity of which tricks
your brain into believing the secret

of simmering
in a wood-smoke-redolent
reduction of souls
(the one that tastes like honey is your very own)
that makes you this cobalt curl of steam
finally climbing into the identity you’ve been
fancying for all eternity:

a heart thrumming crimson
trumpet-flowers
& indigo buntings
born knowing meaning
is forged in the vacuum
of a dragon’s breath

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Please take a moment to check out my author page at Main Street Rag for my newest chapbook, The Death’s-Head’s Testament, scheduled for release in March 2019, and available now for advance orders at $6.50 per copy!

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Chimera

/ stephanielharper / 4 Comments
chimera
Chimera 

Had you been capable of opening
your eyes     you’d have seen

that the obvious upside
to my unique coalescence

of scaly-headed tail     caprid skull
leonine belly     & three belching maws

was my reliable prescience
to forewarn of cataclysm     but

you never ceased to make monstrosity
your sticking point

Even your Lycean forbears’ stories
of the diaspora—        of how my children’s

fetal cells drifted from my womb     endured
the eons amidst the vessel & sinew landscapes

of aliens     & were ultimately delivered
to their new     craggy homeland beyond

the blood-brain cordon    to spawn a nation
of discrete selves as rare & fierce as their maker—

have failed    it seems     to inspire
your affection…

Was the transgression of my seething
once upon a time beneath your collective

hunkering in the basalt’s depths
so heinous as to name me     Anathema

so aberrant as to exonerate
your assassin’s sullying of Pegasus?

Though murder carapaces your shuddering
heads from my ash cloud’s descent

yet know this:     your lost-wax fairytales
have no more tempered the face of who I am

than cast the specter from the dark
hell-fire you dream:     that yet I am

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Vessel

“Chimera” was first published in Isacoustic* in May 2018. Thank you to editor and poet Barton Smock for selecting this piece for inclusion in Isacoustic* vol. the fourth.