“In the Land of Oz”

A poem in homage to the last winter snow
where I live now, in Syracuse, NY, where
L. Frank Baum wrote many of the Oz books
I read as a child in Alabama, anticipating
my love of feminist science fiction and
lesbian adventure.

The side-snow is virgin surface, unmarked
except twigs fallen from a stripped oak,
no human footprint, or animal, to mar
the beginning, like the moon’s dirt before
the spaceship came. But I was never one
to take the first step. Instead I climbed
into the story, the rainbow-striped balloon,
up following her feet, then side-by-side,
drifted toward any emerald-spired town
where everyone could live a little odd. Yet,
so, here I am alone, walking one more time
around Rose Hill Cemetery, looking down
at the ice-petal prints going uphill, the worn
slushed path, because and glad my craving
body said Be brave and go ahead, the hot
mouth opened and stuck out its tongue,
to melt every jot and tiddle of snow that fell,
to eat and mate the strange pollen drifting
leisurely down from the otherworldly sky.


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

"Next"

What keeps us here, knowing we’re going to die?
At ninety-five, Lethean said to know what happens
next. Good enough reason to watch reality TV—
will Nina Flowers ever win?—or go for a walk
and write down I saw the wind’s legerdemain
pull a veil of snow out of thin cold air and disappear
its gauze in one breath, and I saw ice twisted
like plastic bags around bush branches, and ice
stalactites bigger than my arm plunged like spears
into the ground and broken, flung like toppled gods.
Soon all of this will melt away, forever gone,
and reveal underneath another story waiting to be
found, Mama on her hands and knees in the spring
woods, digging in the dead leaves to fold back
the ground, and show me a green triangle of leaf,
a strange budvase of blossom, its small pursed
lips, its purple-freckled brown skin. Nothing said
about my body, you understand, but she did show
me that. There, another story told, twice-told
reason enough to walk around and ask what will
happen next?


Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010