Three Poems by Ellaraine Lockie

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shapeofabox
June 25, 2009

For issue 38 of Shape of a Box we present 3 poems by Ellaraine Lockie.

Copyright 2009

BIO: Ellaraine Lockie writes poetry, nonfiction books and essays. In the last year or so, she has received a writing residency at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA, eleven Pushcart Prize nominations, the Lois Beebe Hayna Award from The Eleventh Muse, the One Page Poem Prize from the Missouri Writers' Guild, the Writecorner Press Poetry Award, the Skysaje Poetry Prize, the Dean Wagner Poetry Prize, the Elizabeth R. Curry Prize from SLAB and finalist status for the Gerald Stern Poetry Prize, the Mudfish Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Award in Poetry, the Joy Harjo Poetry Award, the South Carolina Review Poetry Contest, the Creekwalker Poetry Prize, Press 53 Awards and runner-up in the Georgetown Review poetry contest and the New Millennium Poetry Competition. Recently released is Mod Gods and Luggage Straps, a poetry/art broadside from BrickBat Revue. Forthcoming are chapbooks from FootHills Publishing and Pudding House. Ellaraine serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh, and teaches both poetry and papermaking workshops. Her home webpage is on Literati at http://literati.net/ellaraine-lockie.

Bookworm

Hardcover books from a library sale
Old but not old enough for the antique
that would fend off an attack by an X-Acto knife
Sit stacked in a dark corner
like Jack the Ripper victims awaiting their fate

She avoids looking at them until it's time
Already she knows how she'll use
the safari-patterned linen that dresses
Osa Johnson's memoir, I Married Adventure
Her heart beats faster at the image
of the collage she'll design on recycled leather
The front cover of a hand-bound journal

Fabric pieces combined with baobab bark
guinea feathers, cancelled stamps and inked tattoos
that capture kudu, lions and cheetahs
A silver warthog charm tied in the waxed
dental floss of an open binding
The inside pages of paper made from elephant dung

She tries not to think about dissecting
The English Romantic Writers anthology
Although she knows she will
siphon out the lifeblood binding paste
The dust that rises in a biblio-sized cloud
when she rips off the heart of the cover
That she'll carve out innard names and quotes
of Keats, Coleridge, Shelley and Shakespeare
Then leave the carnage in a garbage heap

The artisan who lives in her needs the fix
To still the slight tremor
The rush of pounding turf in her chest
Like the incessant din
from Mentzelius' bookworm
Its tiny wings clashing against one another

Recycled Sentiments

Pacific Ocean seaweeds float
with paper coffee filters
and espresso grounds
Dregs from gifts of early a. m.
cups of decaf in seaside beds

Pine needles stockpiled
during mountain drives
Picnic by-products
of orange peels and apple cores
Combine with wildflowers
grasses and flashes of bodies laid bare
in fields private behind gravel pits

Sagebrush and lilac blossoms
left scentless beside a bathtub
Their carcasses now blending
with exotic bird feathers
and fragments of fervent poems

All in a potpourri of fibrous reflections
On a love as wasted as these
separate parts of the handmade paper pulp
Before they are boiled and macerated
Molded and dried into stationery
The message sealed with sincerely yours

Floral Memorial

I'm in a Montana mood
in the middle
of metropolitan madness
An altered state
induced by wildflowers
Mountain found
Prairie picked
And pressed into farm town
phone book pages

My June Montana month
replays like a
National Geographic Special
Flashbacks of flowers
unfolding in Technicolor
As I flip frames
that animate images
through wide lens of recall

Of collecting Canadian thistles
that break border laws
Of competing with cows for clover
in Charlie Russell landscapes
And of roadside stops
beside Rocky Mountain beargrass
With ice cream cone blooms
too big and beautiful to behead

But blue-eyed grasses from
the Bridgers fit pages perfectly
And Bear's-Paw picked
yellowbell buttercups
and wild geraniums
tame Silicon Valley's insanity
Its foamed mouth dried

Along with the home-state flowers
Before they are planted
in handmade paper pulp
And immortalized in the compost

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