Ellaraine Lockie

In the past year Ellaraine has received a poetry residency at Centrum in Port Townsend, WA, her eleventh Pushcart Prize nomination, the 2008 Writecorner Press Poetry Prize, the 2007 Elizabeth R. Curry Prize and finalist status for the 2007 Joy Harjo Poetry Award.  Recently released publications are Mod Gods and Luggage Straps, a poetry/art broadside from BrickBat Revue and her fifth chapbook, Blue Ribbons at the County Fair, a collection of first-place contest winning poems from PWJ Publishing.

The following works are copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  

Poets At Any Price      
  
I tell you       
Don’t ever trust poets     
They’ll panhandle
prostitute, fake or take
to get at any truth

They’ll exploit
confessor, friend or family
Confiscate the unconditional
Then give it back
smudged in black ink

I tell you
Because I’ve been truth’s victim
Verbal accounts reiterated
verbatim in someone else’s poem
Secrets exposed as sonnets
Composites as transparent
as the silk panties I wore

I tell you
Revere the poets’ need
to reveal these small realities
Because bigger ones they bare
Bloody ones whitewashed by other informants
Journalists whose jobs are contingent on asking
easy questions at presidential press conferences

The partial truths that smell better
in perfume-sampled magazines
That taste better even as FDA-approved
poisons eat immune systems
That feel better because a cheating
spouse’s arms are safer than none at all

I tell you
Don’t ever trust poets
If you prefer deception
Because truth is their drug
And they’ll do anything
for a fix

  

May 14, 2004

      The day “The New Zealand Herald” ran front-page coverage 
      of Iraq prisoners’ abuse by American soldiers.

Returning from a celebration with the Maoris
The New Zealand tour bus driver
asks the international travelers
to sing a song from their countries
He hands his microphone to a British bloke
Who sings Swing Low Sweet Chariot
Passengers applaud

An Indian woman
sings an exotic serenade
in her native language
Clapping is long and hard
An Irish lad delivers
the ballad Danny Boy
humming the high parts
Appreciative applause

An American woman
with the best voice yet
proudly begins America  the Beautiful
But she stops short
after  “crown thy good with brotherhood”
A silence ensues that erases all borders

She begins again with
I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
It’s not in her range
and she falters with the words
But they forgive her
with ferocious applause

  

Man About Town

His stride was a study in meter
And any female looking his way
from the Leaf and Bean
as he crossed the street
would become an immediate student

Black leather blazer
Body cigar-straight in blue jeans
tucked into boots
Dark hair growing out of his halfway
unbuttoned tan shirt
Two-day stubble and longhair look
of a GQ model

Five sips of coffee later I look up
And he's ransacking
the four trash cans out front
Toasting other people's excess
with paper cups
In moves as fluid as the lattes
chai and chocolate milks
that slide down his throat

He's become a fine wine connoisseur
Who couldn't be bothered to replace
hiking boots with soles wallet-thin
Whose domestic help forgot to hem
the lining that hangs below black leather
Or wash the once-white shirt
that wears the foods he's scavenging

Now he's the city sanitation engineer
conducting a field study
Who sets aside samples of pizza
submarine sandwiches and chicken wing bones
Scoops it all with bureaucratic certainty
into a threadbare backpack
And not one of us watching
wishes to humble him
with the truth of a hand-out

  

  

Writers’ Retreat

. . . observe the things that were and watch them pass, not rushing them along nor holding them too tightly.
      Great Expectations, Harvey Stanbrough

He speaks of writing the world            
Of sensing the wholeness first  
While we sit on hay bales             
Pens in hand     
Near the edge of an Arizona night            
Our mentor encircles the gift of knowledge            
 
His words unwrap it              
Ribbons of preconceptions   
fall to the Sonoran floor     
Sharp observations cut away the clothes 
that seam our separateness             
from sand, saguaro, hawk              
grasshopper and sunset              
      
He casts a last ray of sun
on the continuous web
that weaves us all together
The spider who snares a butterfly
in a creosote bush
Whose seeds feed a kangaroo rat
The two toads who have enrolled in the retreat
And me watching a beetle spin in circles
fighting its own fading light
on a picnic table just out of reach

We’re all related says our mentor
Cousin Coyote, grandfather owl
His words soft now in the silk of night
Brother beetle has flipped onto his back
Legs beating against the darkness
His dirge in baritone buzz
is steel wool that scours the sage’s waxed words

While the other listeners lean into enlightenment
I curl up in confusion’s shadow
Words of patience and intimate observation
waft by in the grey zone
The buzz is bright white and the beat of legs blinding
I want to yank that connecting web
Hang the beetle with Hemlock Society blessing
But I wedge my hands and their traitorous twitch
between butt and hay bale

Our mentor’s final message for the evening
comes on sound waves so round and full
they overflow the soul with ancestral memories
And of the branch from which the flute was formed
Even the beetle is silent
But suddenly propelled by unexplained energy
onto the plate of leftover vegetable wraps
landing up-side down and mute
His legs still moving

The man of wisdom and music sits down as I leap up
Sledge a book of poetry onto the plate
The web snaps like a rubber band
and the entire Sonoran Desert winces
But I’m the one with the welt
that stings and reddens my cheek