Joni Wallace

Music Box

Within the mechanized tomb is an internal cylinder with metal teeth that determine the notes played by a stationary steel comb. I know because I take things apart. On the outside, images of swans. In the inside a swan-chain of sound circling. When Leda first looked up she thought she saw an angel. Maybe it was an angel. You cannot see an angel or know what is contained in its heart. Not the one inside the feathered chest not the scarlet egg projected onto water. Do you believe in God, I asked you. Yes you said. You meant swans. You meant a wheel within a wheel. You meant the first eighteen notes of Swan Lake. Each morning you flew out from behind an ebony curtain. I was wild birds then.

Insecta

Mosquitos whined along the distance of Green Lake while brown-speckled trout mouthed O s into the great gnat-net on the surface. Dragonflies blipped in / out between dimples near where our clothes flapped on a cord scarecrows in the trees. You don’t understand that I hear things. I construct a nest in a process like spinning sugar. From this many versions of you emerge. I don’t remember your favorite color. Is it grass. Is it chlorophyll. Is it pollen stuck to the legs of a drone. When I come across a barn burning I break a window to the roar of bees. The sun’s pheromone blare blossoms with each passing day. I understand my only responsibility now is to carry the ash of honeycombs. For how long. For how long. For how long. 

Magician

Light falls through a latticework of leaves on a checkerboard of nothingness yellow-black tatters of a mind wasping itself into snapdragons. When ambulance sirens you do not get to live a swarm wings out of a window box parasites traverse the needle of a petiole an abdomen or thorax. Some days I feel the miracle of a body in weeds: chiggers the story of stings. Did I say flames did I say yellow jackets in the grass where we used to lay. I lay me down. A praying mantis walks up a stalk the shape of its head called isosceles. Five eyes you say. You are viridian collecting viridian at the edge of a grass-face.

Visibility

Do Not Brake sign signs a dust storm tumbles of desiccated thistle-heads rolling across a road & just off the shoulder in the flats a scorpion’s glow-in-the-dark exoskeleton 435 years old.  I once crawled into a drainage ditch on a dare when the river flooded the road it was Christmas Eve.  We all climbed out of the station wagon to stand in the dark I could not see anything not a shooting star 435 million years old not a comet’s stained-glass tail of ice. Each year sun moon planets crossed through the seven constellations.  Can you name them you said. We made a game of it the scorpion 435 million years old our friends our exhalations the future was never there at all. That was the year you couldn’t sleep. I slept. I dreamed my mother untangling my hair my sister’s the smell of lavender verbena.