6.
Leaving a blood trail, I carry the head through the police warehouse as, by flashing lights, people dance on one floor. Hoping to leave this place, I pack all my Christmas dolls and 3-D scenes. His head is now outlined in gold and imprinted with a map of the world. My dead father sends a letter stamped and canceled with foreign postage while one wall pulls entirely away for a view of the swamp. Instead of an armed response, the animal catcher arrives. In this poker game, Marianne Moore plays. In the house-pool's shallow end, a man fishing. I read the latest Plath bio penned by Roger Moore while my pet mouse chases my pet stinging lizard able to jump and sting two feet in the air. In this city, everyone goes toFurs, Girls, Beer. He likes the design hammered into the table by vandals. With rockets on their backs, men in white space suits fly around and throw sulfur flares into the sky to illuminate the comet. She asks me to draw weather. Engaging in Stooge-isms, the man and woman wash their car, but I tell him I never would have bought the tape if I'd realized it was mime music. To him, the Adultery Channel sounds wonderful. Walking into the spindly Victorian, I trip over elves: Welcome to the year-round Christmas apartments. I ask my sister to take the alien creature for a ride in a fancy car. After 10 aftershocks, I evacuate the building: a whale's head breaks through the asphalt as if it were water. I swim away. Getting an x-ray for my car, I'll be late. In the gas station's restroom, an insect threatens me with its fifty leathery arms, all in the shape of holly leaves.
7.
The boy rows to Golf Island. On an airport layover, I buy a six-foot branch with many awkward limbs. A lighter lit in front of the tiny screen produces a film: bats first, then, the filmmaker pulls back in a narrow tunnel as though giving birth, revealing a crowded beach. At Movie Camp, I land in a snow drift up to my neck. She says, you'd think we were raised in a sty, and, where did chivalry go? They don't know how to pack it, so they kill it instead, and it swings from a long, thin rope. The champagne bubbles up and turns colors in front of the wrapping paper and the pink and blue lights. Sapphire, the camel. And now, people come to the peninsula to see the wreck.
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Want to read Daughter Bird Bone Song 1, as well as 2 and 3? What about 4 and 5?
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The Writer: With undergraduate and graduate degrees in English literature and creative writing, poetry, from UCLA and UF, Gainesville, Michele Pizarro Harman has published poems in such literary journals and online venues as Quarterly West, The Antioch Review, Mississippi Mud, Midwest Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, Berry Blue Haiku, Shepherd’s Check, a handful of stones, The Commonline Journal, and Miriam’s Well. She currently lives with her husband and two of their four children in the small town in Central California where she and her husband grew up; beyond the cows, crows and cranes, she teaches reading, writing, and math to K-6 special-needs students in a public elementary school. She also may be found at: www.michelepizarroharman.com.
The Photographer: wishes to remain anonymous.
The Photographer: wishes to remain anonymous.
