[Webmaster’s Note: We are grateful to Okla Elliott’s sister Vickie Brammer for kindly granting us permission to publish five of his poems, four below and one in our “Farewell to Okla.”]
She wakes up and slides—out of bed
slippery as the whiskey and sex
In the bathroom her reflection grabs her
groggy head for a moment—flicking a tit
with a sigh and a damn—she puts her robe on
While cooking his breakfast; drinking her coffee
(those letters and applications on the corner of the kitchen table)
her soul sags to match the cellulite
Bacon sizzles and the toast burns
she finds her pack and smokes a no-name brand
barefoot on the back porch
The clouds take a pinkish hue
dew slicks the grass
and the sun rises—like it does every morning.
—From Elliot’s first chapbook, The Mutable Wheel (published with funding from a Regional Artist’s Hub grant from the North Carolina Arts council and United Arts Council of Greensboro, 2003)
1.
Askew, askew, I float. The darkling waters
turn my helpless boat round.
The rippling dots of starlight—dead stars, dead.
The rippling of starlight on the water
and overhead. Silently, I merge the world
with my mind. Silently, it becomes one world.
I wobble myself upright and balance.
The body’s warm intensities, its needs,
its abilities. All of this, turning slowly
on the night’s river.
2.
I watch the weather gather
yellow doom into its belly.
The water will wash runnels through the sand.
It will wash away the self-monuments of man.
Say your prayers. The sky won’t listen.
Say them anyway.
The sound of human voice in the storm,
this might be of more value than we can guess.
3.
There is a vowel in the wind. A voiceless vowel.
There is joy in the void. A hopeless joy.
I will ride the waters over the cliff
into the abyss.
I will embrace this apocalypse—
—Previously published in Numéro Cinq (21 March 2017 and 11 October 2016)
I wait, gathering my aged odors
like a medieval cathedral’s high
dank ceiling. My skin’s dried sores
flake in cracking scabs. The rising hills I
tumble are purely imaginary.
I pick my wounds, fascinated,
tickling each open nerve, each airy
ache. The mud and azure braided
together, ironbound, in my life as yours.
Learn from my example and my mistakes.
Patience. We must teach these fragile coils
patience, for every lowly action pours
out our lives. Like the drunkard’s flask slakes
his thirst briefly, our blood refreshes the soil.
—From Elliot’s first chapbook, The Mutable Wheel (published with funding from a Regional Artist’s Hub grant from the North Carolina Arts council and United Arts Council of Greensboro, 2003)
When I was a younger man, a boy,
the intrigue of washing machine doors
trunks, windows, manholes—secret passages
of all sorts—possessed me. I spent hours
passing through and back through
a simple hole in the wall of a condemned house
careful to step with the other foot
or at a new angle each time,
conducting experiments that might foretell
how the world would receive me
and how I would leave.
—From Elliot’s full-length collection of poems, The Cartographer’s Ink, page 84 (New York Quarterly Books, 2014)