The Coming and Going

                                  

 I

To the lean lime grass, bent in the light—I surrender.

and the rough-throated oak telling me white in the winter ---yes.

The swandip of your neck: arrogance or humiliation?---either.

My own stilted dreams, meat and milk---ether.

We will someday call across the deathroom

for a husband, a lover, and will be met

with tears and halting sighs, remembering

the back room between stacked boxes.
Summer thighs surrender.

II

The salty wash of tongues, our seashell fragrance.

(That was before death.) We grieve ahead—yes.

And that dank back room,

finally together ---fumbling cannibals,

murmured incantations: loadseed

and your midnight sobbing,  my blue

goodwill pills. God, and our letters, look,

written with such greedy care!

Ink and wine and paper. I can’t believe you’re gone, you’re---here.

Alicia Fisher

2012

Published in Ravenous Butterfly's online journal, January 2013

Juried into The Belfast Poetry Fest: YES!! (See first "team" on list).

The selection jury for this year’s Belfast Poetry Festival has met and reviewed submissions, and is pleased to announce the lineup for this year’s festival. In no particular order, the twelve teams presenting at this year’s feature event, “The Poem to Behold,” are as follows:

Alicia Fisher and self

Jefferson Navicky and Carrie Scanga

Lee Sharkey and Joan Braun

Carolyn Gelland and Julieanne Reed

Valerie Lawson and Michael Brown

The Poet Rising Collective

Carol Bachofner and self

Margaret Weston and self

Maryjean Crowe and Elizabeth Garber

Rachel Contreni Flynn and Lucy Ellen Smith

Barbaria Maria and Kathryn Robyn

Elizabeth Tibbetts and Robert Shetterly

"...in case anyone missed it, we’ve changed the format for this year’s event. Rather than a gallery walk, this year’s festival will take place at a single venue and will feature a fast-paced, live multimedia show of poems and images, along with a Pecha-Kucha inspired mix & mingle. The festival draws a devoted crowd of poets and artists from across the state and New England, so, regardless of one’s position in this year’s event—whether showcased or supporting—please treat this as an opportunity to make connections, share ideas, and join a lively dialogue about the presence and the possibilities of art...."

Stay tuned at BelfastPoetry.com 

Looking forward to seeing you all in the fall!

Jacob Fricke

Belfast Poetry Festival Steering Committee

Here's the link: http://www.maineartscene.com/component/option,com_eventlist/Itemid,/did,1545/func,details/

Details to follow. Show on Sept. 13

How We Turn Out

for Melissa Crowe  

                  

                          1

You, October, crest with ache into the month

of Scorpio, a small scattering of Saggitari.

Your brittle signs drop at the everrunning feet

            of my two living children.

In this weather, orange pekoe burns the tongue---spiky

and livid. I can barely lift my head to meet

the bruised tatter of sundown.

            Everything reminds me of sometimes-Sunday’s fist:  nose burst

blood flooded my mouth hot, hot my smeared chin red. Outside

a garden of dead orchids. Run. The taste was citrus: the huge work-fist

of my father and his shining eyes, his sick scream stalking.

            A continuation of fevers, vacuums, thick books, places to hide.

                 

                         2

 A new mother stalks robed and flabby

through her orderless kitchen

and steams things. Copper pots and bad

Investments      haunt her lately.

Soon a lady will come to the door.

She will look like an aristocratic runaway

with her stiff luggage and blank tropical eyes.

But she has cream for dimpled thighs,     and a case of lipsticks.

She     says red.    Run.    “Autumn Red is your best color”    
Her fatpowder pink face crowds the door.

In some other world the lady nods compassion---Sweetie, you look like you 
could use a friend. Instead she bends toward the reds, painful rows of them.

Alicia Fisher, all rights reserved 2012

The LSD Journals excerpt #2

Under the Yellow Tent

South Carolina was a smothered tunnel and we were driving through it. The black roof of the Chevy glittered, caressed by the long girlish fingers of Spanish Moss. We rolled endless miles through sinewy, skinless heat. The day burned: it had to be 103 degrees---the sky was a livid fever, a blue baby born too early. Something clattered and screamed, like silverware in an overheated kitchen.  The air conditioning had stopped working back in Georgia. My forehead was a plate of grease. The sundress I wore, the color of an underipe banana, clung to my ribs and belly. Chip was wearing nothing but cutoffs. His tan arm draped hopefully out the window, but there was no breeze. Only a blanket of damp, unbreathing air. “How far to Edisto?” I groaned. Chip lit a cigarette and told me a few more miles. His voice was hoarse and tired. I made scissors with my index and middle finger, the sign that I wanted a smoke. Thin blue clouds streamed from our mouths and didn’t fly out the permanently cranked-down windows but danced coyly above the dashboard. We stunk of armpits and Camels, two limp and sun-dulled vagabonds in our asthmatic black Chevy. All I could think about was the ocean. I was sick of the south, sick of crackly-looking roadside snakeskin, the endless billboard Jesuses and barbeque shacks. We’d been driving for days and days. I wanted a chilly, bitter beer. I could taste it sliding down my throat, the can’s cold sweat dousing my irate August fever.

Fifteen minutes later the ocean rose up and flashed its salty grey belly: the only thing between us was half a mile and piles of pale, silty dunes. My whole body opened up---I strained to see, as if I were looking into a faraway mirror or a reflective store window. And then I could smell it, haul it into my lungs: the dank, tremulous stink of seaweed; the heavy rind of salt-crusted fish. Soon we were in the parking lot. The car clunked and sighed to a stop, glittering blackly as the pavement. It had been a month since I’d seen the ocean. Chip reminded me to put my flip flops on or my feet would burn to a crisp as soon as they hit the tar. I slipped into my cheap rubber thongs and bolted from the shuddering car. The beachpath was a boiling line of packed sand which lead to a wide, dry expanse of soft sand. I ran straight into the thrilling sea, Chip right behind me. It was the anniversary of his dad’s death, and this was the beach where he and his mom and three siblings had spread the ashes nearly ten years ago. I dove into a wave and stayed under for as long as I could. The salient water pushed me back up: I felt colossal, purified and awake. Chip was next to me, splashing and laughing. We played in the water for a long time, like it was our private backyard pool. I kissed and licked the salt from his lips and felt my 19-year-oldness in a way I hadn’t before: greedy and fleeting, ardently physical. I was a luminous morning glory soon to close under the vigorous complaint of day. We held each other in the immense bowl of the ocean, a tangle of arms and legs---and a restive, sudden grief. Chip whispered my name; I looked into the boiling blur of the horizon where he pointed. At first I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. Slick grey lumps rose and fell in the water, creating a delicate raucous of waves. And then I saw them: dolphins. I knew from the many times Chip had told me that dolphins were his dad’s favorite animal. We were like astounded infants with God still in our bellies as we watched the dipping and rising gyrations of the dolphins, their savage-gentle glide. We watched until they became invisible against the immense grey-white skyline: the place where heaven and earth at once collides and divides. Tears dripped from Chip’s whiskered chin, mixing his human salts with the raw salts of the ocean.  We’d come from Maine to Georgia and down to South Carolina---a crazy mix of brute battles and insatiable all-night love making. He’d wanted me to see the waters that had swallowed the precious detritus of his father.  When the dolphins were gone Chip looked at me for a long time. His eyes were solemn green. Sea birds swooped frantically above us. Children came and went in their bright bathing suits and gigantic goggles. The sky over Edisto was a ragged yellow tent that seemed to be collapsing but would, I was sure, hold up.

Alicia Fisher, all rights reserved

I will give my body to the DJ

I will give my body to the DJ

No matter the saturnine air   I am

            my body is stunning   nuclear

The music is dearlife thislife afterlife beforelife I am the throbbing

            instrument jubilant apocalypse I taste of salt and ash   

                        My feet are blistered vehicles

arms long pale ribbons   ribs strange   harps plucked by the fingers

of mutinous ghosts   I will not stop

            dancing I will not stop being the fastidious pump

the sanguine sting    I am the truculent one   my torso is your circumstance

Sweet demon    it will end like this   in the glowing

                        and prayerful middle  I will know my death

            in the shattered

dark of the notes as they plummet

            drum-pulse  bass-throb  electric-trill  

                         I am the mutiny

           

            O the howling staccato bliss of this    my private sacred symphony






Alicia Fisher, June '12

LAST CALL FOR ALCOHOL!

ACCOLADES FOR TENANTS:

“In language that pulls no punches, Alicia Fisher takes on a complex world where savagery can be found just under the surface.   These poems talk back to grief, and more—they insist on compassion.  If this poet is haunted by ruin, it’s because she cares deeply for each wounded soul, and refuses to let one fall uncounted.  Brilliant language, stunning imagery, precise rhythms—Tenants introduces one sure-footed knock-out of a poet!”   Betsy Sholl, Poet Laureate of Maine, 2005-2011

“Once in a while, and not very often, I come across a poetic voice, a way of saying and seeing things, a way of communicating image and story, emotion and intelligence, that cuts through to my soul, sings to me, and I want to share that news with everyone that I know. Alicia Fisher, a Maine poet, has hit me that way this year.

I have only read her poems online, but soon Finishing Line Press will publish a first collection of her poems, and I look forward to holding that book. I keep going back to her blog, hoping that new poems will have appeared.

She says "It occurs to me that I am in fact nailing my poems in place, keeping them in time and space, keeping them occupied and bleeding."  Gary Lawless, poet and teacher

“Alicia Fisher’s unforgettable voice fearlessly engages the gritty, disturbing aspects of everyday life, this “horror show” filled with beauty and despair. The veil of illusion has been lifted, yet we come away feeling revitalized by her emotional force, wit, and humor.  Each poem jolts the senses, placing us firmly into the scene it describes. In the hands of a less skillful poet, many of these scenes would feel merely gloomy, but the vigor of Fisher’s language reminds us why we move on.” Benjamin Bertram, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine

Happy holidays to you and you and you!
Yours,
A

For J and N, a million times

Twice

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.—Robert Frost

 

I

Fire

It is courageous, or at least secretly brave, to use the word

love. A word that mouths open on like God or Suicide,

a word that teeth cannot chew wholly through: caustic, mythical, smashed

between dictionary pages on an unlit shelf between James Wright,

his solemn admission: I have wasted my life and Nancy Drew
with her secret rooms, pretty questions, and an uncanny intelligence

   I once believed

I wanted to have if only to chase down devils and men

in long dark coats. And devils in long dark coats disguised as men.

 

 II

Ice

I stood in a field. It was late September and the air smelled

vaguely of fire, or more like the beginning of fire, long

ribbons of smoke twining from chimneys. Light spilled 

like an accident from a hole in the sky.
In that field a girl died, was killed. His thumbs
left a necklace of bruises, delicate purple pearls

around her neck. February, 1998. She was late coming

home. While her father was on the phone with the police

she was raped to silence at the base of a wintering oak.

Her ears became seashells cradling the oceanic roar

of his name. He told the cops later that he whispered

his name in her ear as he drove her body back into the frozen

ground, gripping fistfuls of her long brown hair. Fists filled

with silk, going-cold fire. Then he wrapped the warmth

of himself, those big apehot hands, around the base of her neck.

III

Twice

Three years later I stood in that field, bright September.

The trees dragged their palms

across the needle tips of grass, grass unbending

in the smoky wind. He’d hung her coat on the brittle hook

of a branch. I could not feel her ghost when I touched the smooth bark,

could not feel the violence that had followed her boot prints.

How could the sky could just watch, the oak

just stand there? Later that night when I felt

your breath unraveling like dim smoke from your mouth

I knew you’d come before me. Hard not to imagine you were him

I was her; the ceiling was witness to our fragile hunger, the bed

accomplice to our shy violence. Every last moment shrieking out

of its skin, on fire. She must’ve begged to escape into a snow bank,

to extinguish the horror, to freeze before dying. In this same way I climb

your body, claw my way from that winter crushed

field I saw, didn’t see, in the bloodlight of September,

from the end-roar of his name in her ear, his name from the memory

of myself in that field seeing nothing but making my way

through fallen leaves that crunched like snow to reach

her death that was not mine

but could’ve been.