Editor’s note: In this month’s Poetry Corner, we feature Patricia Zylius, a copyeditor who lives in Santa Cruz. She gardens, practices tai chi, walks and listens mostly to music written before 1750 and jazz. Her poems have appeared in the Porter Gulch Review, the Monterey Poetry Review, and caesura.

Locus

Pain is a blind mole
tunneling through the yard of my body.
It claws its way between my ribs,
vexes muscle and bone.
For days it lies unmoving in its burrow.
Then I’ll reach for a plate
and it jerks awake.

Once the damp dishtowel
in my father’s hand
flew across my cheek.
Something with teeth
entered me then.
But something else stepped out
and observed
the hot sting
from a distance
as though I watched some other face
I did not care about.

In the thirteen years he’s been in the ground
I’ve never visited his grave,
never pressed my hand against the gray stone
that weighs on his rotted head.

He Is, I Am

It does not shake the bed,
this soft catching sound, somewhere between a kah
and a chuh. Benign, you’d think, almost soothing,
like distant thunder, only it’s too close and erratic.
The exhalations begin to stick,
so there’s no room for incoming
air, until the lungs that long to empty
loudly knock the blockage outward.

I poke. He shifts. I drift
toward sleep. Then there it is, that rattling.
I want to tie a slipknot in a length of string,
loop it over his uvula,
then tug whenever the fleshy appendage
plugs the top of his throat.

Earplugs? I might as well install microphones
at all my moving parts.
I hear my own breath galing in and out,
pulse thudding in my ears, the small irregularities
in my heartbeat jerking me into alarm.

Oh life, life, how noisy
you are. How silent
the body of our friend in the hours after he left it.

Sacrament

How long does it take that bit of ash scattered
on the soil beneath the apple tree he planted
to wash down to roots, be sucked
up through sapwood
and flow out into fruit?
 
It’s too hard, thinking him gone
for good.
The planter of the tree
becomes the tree.
 
And this is how I bear it —
I take
and eat.

Communion

Such a small pile in my palm
palest gray, bits of bright bone
among the ash
and the plain white gold band
I never got rid of —
we sat on the back porch that night years ago
and unmarried ourselves,
wet our fingers in our mouths so we could slide
rings over knuckles. I don’t know
what he did with his, but I keep mine
with this meager teaspoon of him.
 
I pick up the biggest piece
and rub my thumb along its smooth side,
turn it over and look with aching fondness
at its tiny pocks and grooves.
What part of him was this? Finger
bone in a hand I held?
Did I caress the skin that covered it
when we made love? How miraculous
to survive the fire!

When I pour him back into the little Chinese box,
a powdery residue sticks to my hand,
won’t quite brush off. I touch my tongue
to the dry nearly sweet dust,
take him into me.

Phiz

The topography of his visage
did not invite
pleasure-seeking travelers —
an unfriendly terrain
of ridges and furrows,
pits and crags, the expanse
of his brow wide as the Arctic tundra.
His pinched and twisted
mouth, roughly round, its edges
irregular, wrinkles like roads
and rail lines heading out
in all directions from a major
transportation center.
This was territory
to avoid.

What tectonic rumblings
could have produced
such an angry landscape?
His mind raged at the molten core
of his head, deliberately
sealed off from exploration.    
He was stuck in there,
righteous and stubborn,
his life’s harvest
sour as a shriveled orange    
picked too early
then left too long
in a sidetracked box car
somewhere on the Great Plains,
dry wind sucking the juice out
through the rind. 

Monsters

Japanese beetles swarmed over the leaves,
iridescent foreigners, their natural enemies
left behind in the old country.
Mother issued coffee cans with water in the bottom.
She wanted to add turpentine
to kill them faster
but we needed live subjects.

Eager researchers, we scooped
the bugs from the shrubbery by the handful,
dumped them in and gave them sticks
to crawl on. We picked them up and ran our fingers
along the tufts of white hair
sticking out their sides
while barbed legs waved
in the air. We pulled off
their coppery wing covers,
then threw them back into the mass
of shimmering green bodies.
Still they climbed again and again
so we removed the legs
one at a time, to see how many amputations
it would take before they could barely walk.
Tiny appendages piled up on the sidewalk.

We sat hunched over our work, muggy
heat hanging from the trees.
Leaves drooped as we dissected, inspected.
The beetles clicked quietly against the metal.
When we heard the screen door
slam, we grabbed rocks from below the devoured
hedge, spilled our victims onto the hot cement,
smashed them all, and swept
the evidence into the gutter.

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