KatieBatten

Spunky seahorse living in the deep blue sea...

Excerpts from Turning the Silver Wheel

Link to Purchase Poetry Turning the Silver Wheel is a collection of poetic-prose styled in Katie's miniature narrative, where each poem's emotional intensity and movement runs counter to the seeming structure and solidity of the paragraph that contains them. Meant to be read aloud in a kind of rapid, Slam poetic style, words jump off the page confronting the reader with experiences of loss, battery, longing, and despair. In keeping with all her work, Katie infuses herself, her vulnerabilities, her love, and her shame within the tightly packed paragraphs that make up this volume, as if to somehow contain her own sense of "bigness" or as she describes, her "too-much-muchness."

All excerpts © 2011 by Katherine Batten MacDowell, all rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction without written consent from author strictly prohibited.

My Od

He is a shadow slipping into night, a wisp of memory as if he never was. The wild hunt screams at the dark moon, the still moon swallowed up by wolves of sky. My ears sting with pain. My heart is raw; my skin sweat slicked. He is my most precious gold, my finest richness at my core. I feel the flame of a burning, impossible grief. Gold melts pouring from my center, slipping through my fingers as I attempt to staunch the flow. It pools at my feet, a puddled reflective beauty. My fingers claw at it, but it has solidified, like yellow wax on shag carpet. A nail breaks and I feel another biting twinge of a desperate grief to pull him back into me, to tuck him into this empty chest cavity. And I claw; I claw at the metal-frozen substance. But he cannot be lifted, so heavy has my heart become. And I am alone, my tear-streaked face shimmering in the gold. My Od, my Od…




Glass

Pieces of thin-blown glass slip from my chest to the rubberized floor at your feet. They do not shatter, but bounce, made with my contained and anticipating breaths. I fear your feet. And I watch them in their battered sneakers, scuffed and worn down at the soles. You have worn them too long; they are habituated. The edges of your jeans are frayed slightly, strands of underlying uncolored white thread slip out. What is the white thread of you? I see only your faded blue. You bend low. I feel my chest tighten as you gather up the glass. A thin strip of blood streaks across your palm. You give it back. It is not my inner white thread that you want. I am just a piece of broken glass.




Longings

I dwell on you. You slip in and out of my mind. You move through my body and I shudder. I dream of your eyes drinking me in like a warm mocha. I long for your lips to consume the whole of me as I melt in your heat like chocolate. I dream of nourishing myself on your sticky nectar as your breath pauses only to rapidly inhale as you drown in my mouth. I dream of lying upon your bed in the blanket of your salty smell as a riptide pulls me willingly under. I dream of whispering three fragile words to you.




The Silver Wheel

I am on the beach; it is twilight. The sky is blue-gray streaked with purple-red. A briny mist dampens my thinning fire-flecked hair so it sticks to my cheeks. But I am unconcerned. I smell of honeysuckles and sea. My heart pounds in rhythm to the waves as my bare feet sink into the scratchy sand. I am covered with a cloud-wispy white dress that loosely billows about my bare legs. My heart stands before me, a broad smile across his face. He bends low to me for the kiss and we inhale each other’s earthy scents: he of autumn’s ocean and I of summer’s. We flow into each other in the turning of the silver wheel.




Beautiful

There is much written of what is beauty, the aesthetic of beauty: the shape, the color, the sound, the substance of beauty. I am not beautiful. I am excluded from this; I exclude myself from this. I see imperfections: white streaks of striae slashing across my thinning abdomen—stretch marks from my fat suit. I see scars under, around, down the breasts as nipples were moved and rearranged to be more beautiful—leaving a jagged pass through the hillside. I see razor burns reddening my small, narrow legs; while my blood vessels constrict in a purple flame that stretches up to my thighs. I see a pimple, red and angry at the chin in an otherwise porcelain white face with a healthy red glow that belies a hallmark of illness. I see a yellow tinge on the otherwise bright white teeth of too many antibiotics. I see the one eye and the mouth on the right that droops ever so slightly lower than the left. My hair twines about my fingers slipping away from its root on my scalp. I see a thinning patch from medications and disease. All maps not of beauty but of illness that lurks behind a shadow of seemingly bright, healthy glow and invigorated youth. I am not beautiful. I see only my imperfections—mapped across my body communicating to any lover who looks closely of my damage. I am ugly, uneven, disproportionate, streaked with mismatched colors, bumpy, and rough. I am not beautiful.




Sonata

The melodies flowed from deep within me and onto the paper—black dots, squiggles, and lines scratched in a foreign symbol system secreting away a story of you readable only by an initiated few. You are a sacred mystery of my life. Each measure a poetic, mystical sentence reverberating: I love you, I love you, I love you. So many possible ways to convey this in a mixture of notes and rhythms I have only scrawled them at the surface of your depth. You are my secret passion, my hidden song flowing beneath the inaccessible dots and lines and squiggles. You, my beautiful you, who fears listening to what you might intuitively hear—a soft and insistent, I love you, as the dots, lines, and squiggles are joined together and translated by the piano, the guitar. I explore the nuances, the depths, the sacredness of you as the melodies are secreted away in runic inscriptions only a few know.



Twilight

Your other mother is the moonlit goddess Arianrhod. She birthed you into the world by magic. You emerged into strife and fled to the sea, a spirit unbound from his human form. You floated in the calm darkness, refusing rebirth. You swam sticking to the depths of obscurity to avoid the pain of the life, the entangled feelings, that you would surely be destined to know if you emerged from the oceanic womb. For you, each day is ruled by the predictable flowing of the incoming and outgoing tide of your moon mother, who rocks you to sleep in the familiar lullaby of routine. But the Sky Woman fell into your sea, bringing a light that captivated you and you rose up from your depths for you are not the uncompromising harshness of the sea as others have said; this is not who you really want to be. You are the unloved moonchild who saved the unloved sunchild and swam her to shore. And there we lay sun and moon together, a perpetual twilight and sunrise—the intimate union of the horizon touching sea. We lay until you receded once more to your depths as high tide overcame you. But I remain hovering at the water’s edge for some sign of your return, forever in my twilight.


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ISBN: 978-1-257-86453-9