A CIRCUS OF SCISSORS

I want to dance like a Fauvist’s brush.

Live like a Matisse cut-out looks.

This is the way I will dodge

the knife-thrower’s knives –

by turning each blade

into something else.

By painting

with scissors.

THE LEVER

You can fashion one from anything.

A shovel, a broken branch, a habit.

Just find the pivot-point, pry and push.

That’s all that’s needed –

a jimmying gesture,

actual or otherwise.

With it will come a chain reaction

and the feeling 

that you’re smelting something

or that a stampede is on the way.

And it is.

Do not run.

Be the bison that turns

into the storm.

DISAPPEARING ACT

Go ahead,

dash the potions

from the magician’s human hands, clip

memory from owl’s broken wing.

For every part you aim to erase

the greater absence occurs in you.

Think twice, my little one,

before you redact the name 

of the devil who wronged you

from the jaundiced pages

of the grand grimoire –

before you give the henchman 

the nod. Betrayer or not,

if they drop

through the gallows’ floor

you drop with them.

THE SHOEBOX

It was a long bus ride

living with the fear, the threat,

that bullies would take from you—

even kill—what you carried

from your 3rd grade science class

with care, home.

Safe and proud, you entered the house

knowing you had kept a thing from harm–

and knowing

just where you'd put it,

the shoebox:

beside all your Oz books.

What the box contained

was the stuff of dreams, magic,

that, if you were careful enough,

nurturing enough,

might carry you,

like Dorothy,

from twisters

to yellow brick roads.