Cynthia Arrieu-King
LOVE AND DREAMS
A large illustrated mushroom. It’s rose pink and gray on the wall, but builds to
magenta near the bottom of the cap. Burnt orange stem. In a curve, it stands on
daubed acrylic green. It’s a chunk. Glowing, resonant, sheened, blissed out. You
almost don’t want to see the rest of the room. It’s not going to compare. The sky
behind the mushroom is white. Each day—something pulled from behind the
ear of nature. A flag. A cap. Rude newness. And in this way, not stopping, not
having to manage or reckon. Accepts panic as part of shaky ground. And shaky
ground a place to be before reckoning with a heart, a heart speechless. You put
your hand on my shoulder, and I say something about the sun. That I can’t think
because I’ve been in the sun too long. The sensation of an echo simmering
through scalding sun. The sensation— that your hand is almost hot—to keep me
here. Healing has a speed—the same as the speed of nature.
LOVE AND DREAMS
Dress a heart slowly in ointment and moss, tissue paper tucked down, and
imagine green light pulsing from the moss into the meat—like a Suzanne Ciani
situation but with light. Easy balm, green light down to its cells, to an energy
mending the breaking / the tears in the envelopes left open, words said too
loudly, the fake elephant feet pressed into the zoo sidewalk. Crumbs of new
moss give off an answer invisible but in the mind: green. How can you bathe,
anoint, lightly bind, prepare the heart as if to slide into an oven except you mean
to heal it, dress the wound again and walk away, start over every day, every
morning? Every morning, you peel papers back, these light doors and winds—to
those smallest plants doing their magic overnight. The moon throws in a little
bitterness as a balm. The cut slowly mends, opposite of subtraction.
LOVE AND DREAMS
A sculptured white cloud. The cloud of tiny water droplets, heavy as three
hundred elephants. Inside it, sometimes an airplane slides through. It
waits for the hot day, a meadow to float over where it will get smaller, smaller,
against the blue, peel down another minute, weigh a bit less, and drift until it is
a scrape, a mist, an interval, a slip, then gone. Then, another cloud moves in over
the treeline, a traffic of clouds, right into the warmth.
Cynthia Arrieu-King teaches creative writing in the Literature Program at Stockton University. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus Books 2010), Manifest, winner of the Gatewood Prize selected by Harryette Mullen (Switchback Books 2013), Futureless Languages (Radiator Press 2018), and Continuity (Octopus Books 2021). She's working on short stories as well as a novel about caregiving and a bot. She lives in Philadelphia and Louisville.