A new short story. Available here and in print in "Cream" a coffee shop chap book. 

Star Girl and Bear

            “It’s not really a star you know,” she said.

            I hadn’t heard her come up behind me yet I wasn’t startled. Her voice seemed a natural part of the hot summer night.

            I didn’t turn around yet I felt her presence and in that feeling was vision. I could see her, though not with human eyes. A sixth sense informed my mind. Maybe from the starlight I had touched and brought down into myself.

            “I know that,” I said. I turned and threw a bolt of light at her. It shattered, split and dissolved.

            She must have a shield, I thought

            “Who are you?” I asked

            “You know me. Why do you waste words?”

            “Why didn’t you take the light into you?” I asked her.

            “I am the light,” she said.

            “But you’re not starlight,” I laughed.

            “I am all things,” she said.

            “So am I,” I said, “but let’s play anyway. C’mon, lets fly.”

            I grabbed at her hand but caught air instead. I jumped into the air and hoped she would follow. She didn’t. She dissolved. A puddle of light remained where she had been standing. I floated down and peered into it. Inside it was a complete replica of the night sky as it was above. I heard a laugh behind me, turned and there she was again.

            “I don’t follow,” she said.

            “I see you’ve given up playing too,” I said.

            She reached her hand over her head and plucked a shining dot from the dark sphere above and stretched out a long rope of light from it. She threw the rope at my feet and it rose up my ankles twisting and turning and binding me from ankles to thighs. I laughed as I levitated upwards into the air above her head. I pierced the light rope with another beam of starlight I caught from her hair. 

            Her long dark hair waved luminously in the air around her body. Long indigo colored feathers appeared at both sides of her face. Colored lights played bead like patterns in them.

            She rose into the air next to me and we merged into one body with two heads.

            “Ok, you win let’s play,” she said.

            We soared off above the buildings and joined into a single tiny moth shape with our two heads smiling at each other. Our laughter sounded like the bumping of wings on the windows we peered into as we flew from one to another to laugh at the mortals in their tiny closed rooms, watching electronically produced images tell stories for them.

            Her long dark hair tangled with mine forming black and white pools of light then red, green, yellow, orange swirling spiraling colors.

            We kissed and split into two human looking bodies, hers male and mine female. We let the bodies play floating in the air, making love in sexual ecstacy then changing forms. I became male and she female.

            As we blended bodies again into orgasmic thrills of light, color, pattern, she chanted:

            “When the Moon reaches us and teaches us

We reach for roots that are all gone into infinite touchings

Beyond the mouth taste buds of wines.

They find us hiding in the bodies of cats, dogs, cars, mechanics, and strange shoes......

When the tongue touches the morning coffee and cries your name and mine

They are both immediately lost in the DNA of blood boiling in each ear that we

As organized as we are

Parcel into a beautiful flesh bag for carrying into prestige or worldly transcendence again

As our Dreams require

While we hurry hither and here

Always into Magick.

Because what else could we be but Magick

And the great haunting of liminal kisses

Brings us unto the absolute knowing of another daughter

Until we find the streets that are grieving our absence.

We are gone into rebirth and forgiving

That has nothing to do with today's news

and is more than mortal bone and nerve.”

            She split from me and became a bear pattern of stars against the black sphere above. I flew after her but she sent a wave of light that pushed me backwards and I fell to the ground. I was in female human form again, standing in the parking lot of the apartment complex where I live.

            I reached up and picked the bear pattern from the sky and wove a chain of light and put the bear on it to wear around my neck.

            “Got you,” I laughed.

            Her voice blended with the hot summer air as she growled, then laughed and disappeared.

When Covid-19 hit, the bookstores that carried the hard copy of New Legends zine closed and as you know the whole country slowed down or stopped and certainly changed. The impetus for online posting slowed down for New Legends Zine, too. However, we are still alive and New Legends are important, maybe now more than ever! So today after a long hiatus, I am posting something new here. For you who have read the previous stories and have wondered where I've gone and for all of us! 

POET'S STORY

       “Once lonely, hard to recover."

"I smell onions and dank wet earth. I can’t think. My hair is too long and my poets shirt too loose.”

       “Five years of solitude and no door. A poets words are meant to be heard, not blocked by isolation.”

       Tripping on tangled bed sheets he falls. Mouths and eyes appear in the Persian carpet where he lands.

       “It’s the moon and nothing more that puts eyes upon these floors, puts words within the  patterns woven so long ago.”

       Struggling to his feet, he hits the wall where a vision of green meadows appears. He tries walking into the meadow and is slammed to the floor again.

       “Ravens and hawks, tic toc.What good is poetry if it turns no locks?”

       “Wait! Aha, another door! A poets words never fail, even in this crazy hell.”

       Flapping his long poets sleeves he leaps into the air and slams into the wall again. Moths fly from his chest. An infinity of images of himself appear, hanging from clothes hangars, saggy and gray in a cosmic closet.

       A skeleton on a riding lawn mower bursts through the vision of the meadow on the wall, cutting down heads that pop up in a plot of green grass that floats in front of the mower. The poets ex-wife is riding naked behind it. She’s laughing and throwing empty gin bottles into the poets room.

       “Oh what a wonder! I was married to that once. Now she rides with the cutter of men, laughs and throws gin.”

       He runs towards the green meadow, hits the wall, falling backwards into broken gin bottles on the floor.

       “Stop these mad illusions. They tangle me and make me fall. But to where? Up somewhere, I hope.”

       “Who is it sends them? Is it me? It cannot be, for a kinder night I would if ‘tis me. But what kind? A feathered bird of gin drunk mind? Or another more metallic beast made of amalgams not in my drink?”

       “I am but a poor poet! Let me be! This is my part of eternity and words are what I want. Another book. Stop these cruel hallucinations.”

       “Free me Muse. You bring walls and false visions of meadows you give me. Why? Have I not bled enough but only sweated?

       “Quick, a cooling drink. T’will help me think.” (Steps on gin bottles cutting his feet.)

       “Ah, but afterwards a shard of glass as all intoxication passes leaving this fake meadow and a fall.”

       “These bedclothes. Let me cut them to bind my feet cut on gin bottles and a poets unwanted and empty words.”

       “A little blood is not so bad, yet don’t take all I have. Even a Muse must have a heart of sorts and these illusions must pass. Even a nightmare has it’s limits. Does it not?”

       “Why torture me? Is it planets in retrograde? Mercury Gemini twins seeking one to blame one to twain the monstrous visions that make words? It is too much.”

        “Are you happy now? Have I proven myself? What Self? I was you in another dream. Tic toc the clock turns backwards. We begin again. Illusions never ending.”

       “Next time it is I who will test you, having learned the game. T’was you who taught me that with my life I must experiment. I gave free reign to disdain of the human condition and laughed. But have I  proved that poetry can open a door even if the body is broken on the floor?”

       “What am I? A moments shiver, not more. Skinned for a moment, then  another skin and lots more sin.”

       “Is it the moon, that ultra violet pooling in the brain, that sets us back in body of pattern, color, heat, cold, another sun in another bipolar universe? AND POETRY AGAIN?”

       “I see a dragon in the sky smoking a cigarette lit upon an altar pyre of light. A sacred thing.  And then a duck, quack, quack and a child rushing forward into life in the golden clouds with a quick backward look to see the illusion of the sky turn turquoise for another myth.”

       “Paper clouds turn yellow-gold. Words are indelibly writ once and for all, forming droplets of DNA rain that feeds flowers, meadows and the poor species of humans with shit on their tails and their heads in the stars, who suffer or thrill to illusion after illusion.”

       “Time is eons, tic toc tic toc. Ravens, crows, eagles and hawks. The return of the bird people again and again, serpents with feathers, or metallic beasts, a cauldron of birth, death and Magick.”

       “The Shaman’s fur will come again. Cat fur, dog and human hair. All will be coupled.

       “Drums will pound in the human heart and in insect’s wings. Lynx ear hairs will quiver to the mumbled roar of deer eating grass. Automobiles will disappear. Vulgar mask cages will go away. Mushrooms will be food. Leaves will return as plates. A smile will replace a fake handshake.”

       “No one will be afraid of death  and the words of poets will always open doors.”

The Wine it doth moisten my eyes

The spheres do better see

While it doth dry my mouth

And fatten my tongue

Making it harder to speak.

That which doth make the heart merry

Doth make the tongue thick.

Laugh not at my twisted tongue.

These visions!

How say them  even with an untwisted tongue?

The Poet must be moist with wine

Err Hemlock be his bane

And wipe unruly visions from his mind.

Forever.

In wine or brandy there is Joy.

In Hemlock no party

Less it be in Parting.

The Mystery of the temporariness of all things

Is the key to the end of all misery.

Why worry what comes next?

Something will and will also end.

Therein is the true Poets story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Legends Zine Issue 13