Patty Dickson Piezcka (3 poems)
FRIDA
I paint flowers
so they will not die
-Frida Kahlo
My spine is a broken matchstick.
Fire licks my bones
and steam whistles
through my tea-kettle heart.
Sometimes the pain is so great
skeletons crawl from my mouth.
The nails in my skin
are almost sacred. They hold
my soul in place.
Only colors
can open my petals—
the palette, the shapes,
the lines that root me
to this life.
REFUGEES
We live on the border
between swallowed songs
and wings.
Moon slides down our backs,
but darkness holds our hands,
guiding us blindly.
Home has become this goat path,
narrow and winding as a snake
in the brush.
We walk along its slippery back,
careful and quiet,
trying not to wake it.
We mix the night's pain
with pigments of ground plum petals,
malachite and berries
to paint ourselves
into this landscape.
Salvation is hidden
somewhere among the black leaves.
Our silken hope slips
through these dark branches.
AT HORSESHOE LAKE
I pull sunlight from your hair
to make our shadows pour
into the cypress swamp,
where rivulets spill back
to the time we met.
Tupelo leaves brush the colors
left by secrets barely whispered—
words beyond flight
and dream, strung to
neither root nor bone,
words tumbling in shapes
never recognized before.
We unbutton the hours
until day and night
meet briefly at the horizon;
they kiss, still making
each other blush
after so many years.
Patty Dickson Piezcka is the author of Beyond the Moon’s White Claw (Red Dragonfly Press) She won the Library of Poetry Book Award for 2012 from The Bitter Oleander Press. Other books are Lacing Through Time (Bellowing Ark Press, 2011), and a chapbook, Word Paintings (Snark Publishing, 2002). In both the 2012 ISPS contest and the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, she placed first and has had writing contributions in more than fifty literary journals. She graduated from the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Her short play won first prize from the Paradise Alley Players, and she received first place in the fiction contest at John A. Logan College.