The perfume sold at the mall smells like feet

(actually, feet aren’t that bad)

while the herbs I plant taste miraculously:

sage, rosemary, and mint.

I plant them in my garden and in pots

for the porch, windows, and my desk—

a song arrives all the way

from my grandmothers’ gardens

like snooping through an old drawer

finding yellow pictures

of faces I don’t know but recognize

in the mirror.

All the things I want my child

to discover: the smell of chamomile

the calm of clematis,

the peace of basil,

the wisdom of cornflowers,

the prayer for bees.

The pendulum stops. I think without motion,
spiraling into paralysis. The day ticks on.

Undevelopmental chrysalis, blankets and mugs
of dust-covered domesticity, the impossible

wrangling of all chores: replastered walls
and clothes in the right places, no more

weeds and a brother who goes to bed
without sleepless bruises underneath his eyes;

more than impossible, cuts deeper than
impossible.

Photographs of the Living, Photographs of the Dead

You can ask the living what
they were laughing at.
They’ll tell you. Maybe
they weren’t laughing.
Maybe they’ll tell you
a story, or save it for later
when it’s just the two of you
at a bar downtown, day-drinking
on a spring afternoon, long
enough since lunch to be loopy
enough for them to tell
you about the donkey
and the three guys in thongs:
Oh, that picture, yes. . .

The dead can’t answer.
Your mother can’t tell you
whether the pearls circling
her neck were cultured
in oyster farms or fakes or
where she got them for
what occasion, can’t tell you
who taught her to arrange
her hands over the piano’s
keys in a perfect cage
of fingers or tell you
again how the train
once stopped in your
small town twice a day
on its way to Detroit,
engine cindering
the sky the way a heart
burns out, blackened
fist of red meat.

Astrology has hurtled my body through
the unfeeling heavens, surrounded by

bodies unheavenly, torn to bits by
black holes, drained by energy voids,

knocked about by asteroid belts,
at the mercy of the cold dark,

crying for gravity’s cotton pull
on Earth’s atmosphere, wanting less

of the final frontier and more of a
fenced plot, secure, unbeholden to

the planets, signifying only itself,
drinking freely of the mechanical sun.

I fight through plate-tectonic poetry.
I have my axe. Where is the frozen sea?

Inspired by a Kafka quotation.

I don’t want to end up carved 
In jade like my parents, playing
The same twenty songs
Over and over, grasping 
For a youth that was taken
Too quickly by children and marriage
And work. I want to keep reaching,
I want to be a plant that grows 
Too big for its pot, so you have to replant
It in the garden, where it can get at more
Sun and sky and rain.
Lord, keep my bones supple
Like they were when I was a girl,
Keeping me awake at night 
With how they were stretching
Me into something new.
Let the fear of death keep me running
Instead of frozen in its headlights.
You always hear about fight or flight,
But you very rarely hear about the deer’s option:
Freeze.

Tell me how you stand the day,
how lilies spread open to the sun
smiling between the clouds of this world.

Tell me how my fall in the forest
makes no sound because pain
cannot exist in your world.

Tell me how a mirror stands age,
how its light is clear water, not blood
cut loose in the breakage of the world.

Tell me how to paint a watercolor
landscape that won’t wash away
in the tearfalls of the world.

Tell me how my love must fall
into your eyes and see the way
to waterfalls of joy in this world.

Tell me again and again
before I fall again,
not making a sound in this world.

playground mulch, back when it was still wood chips,
tasted like paper and dirt and spit and blood from tongue-splinters.
i had to enjoy it with his knee in my back.

His skin is all overlapping
strips of mahogany and cedar—
an exoskeleton so calcified now,
you wouldn’t be able to
find the rings if you tried.

An empty nesting doll
is where his ticker should be
and if you look close
you’ll find silkworms
hard at work stitching
together the edges
where he is most serrated.

The more laps around
the sun he makes,
the more driftwood
you’ll find building
behind his eyes.

To stop it,
you’ll want to say
only the right things like,

Whenever you laugh,
I am your freshest kill.

But then he’d just keep
waning gibbous—
a sepia flare against the night—
further and further
away from you.

Haiku

Sun mantles the lake
Wind stirs the flow, and shifts us
Trees knit the surface

                                    by Karen George

 ~ Found poem composed from Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the Light We Cannot See, p. 520