Volume 14:4, Fall 2013
Prose Poem Issue
The Circus Arrives Without Warning
A big top goes up. Banners bloom in the dream field like a zinnia garden. I wander through days that are green and assaulted by rain. Nights are charged with grandeur. Sometimes I lose myself in a blur of fireflies. Often I move as if I am burning, as if I am a topaz sky. My mother was wrong. Anything is possible. I am not a plain girl, wrapped in brown paper.
She emerges as mist, too familiar in her contours. For a moment, she and I are one. I become her story, beautiful and silent, an illusion of silk sliding from sleeves and pockets. I offer her gestures that are buoyant, capable of flight, fragile as flesh. She transforms them into black sand, into seething bees, into something torn. A childs valentine, injured and changed by love.
And Again I Dream of My Mother
I would like to give you the silver branch, Mother. Id like to give you blue swallows, evanescent skies. The bridge between us is webbed by spiders; I have stood at its threshold, reading the silk-spun lessons. What traps, what land mines are set for me? Tell me the history behind your sapphire lies, the truth behind your ghost letters, those dreams you composed yourself. This world, this blue, blue world is not written in stone.
Mother, the choke cherries are waiting for time to move toward morning. Tree frogs are rasping away my scars. The moon is a chewed cuticle. I dont want your stone primers. Ill have none of your wisdom anymore. No smear of red lips, no scent of mimosa left upon my pillow. Im weary, so weary of your songs, the way you flow from me like water.
Gail Braune Comorat, a founding member of Rehoboth Beach Writers' Guild, has been published in Grist, Adanna, and Gargoyle. She received a 2011 fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts as an emerging writer in poetry, and was the winner of the 2012 Artsmith Literary Award for her poem "Summer of Ladybugs."