CHRYSTAL KING

Crystal King is a working writer living in the Boston area. Currently, she's
engaged in several writing projects, including writing a full-length novel,
working as co-editor of the literary arts journal, Plum Ruby Review
(www.plumrubyreview.com) and developing creativity tools for writers as her
thesis project for her M.A. in Critical and Creative Thinking at UMass Boston.
Most recently, her poetry appears in the Rose & Thorn, Astropoetica, The
Mini-Mag, Small Spiral Notebook and Verse on Vellum.

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THREE MUSEUMS IN THE LAST AUTUMN OF THE MILLENIUM

I savor each piece. Canvases soak thick oil into
my skin. A hundred vermilion-robed Virgins smile
down upon me. Winged angels, laughing goddesses and
chubby cherubim brush slight fingertips of myth
across my cheek.

Religion floods through me. I fall, prostrate
on the rough stone floor. Voices echo off wood
beams, white walls, the weary ivy canopy
covering the skylights.

Over the chanting priests, the thick thought of
Egyptian funerary incense, statues of gods and
the blessed angelic voices of eunuch choirs, there
is a low humming rage. It’s a sideways companion,
borne of religion and yet brother or lover or master of
deities old and new.

I feel it pressing against me. Black lagoons of shiny
ink and iron overlap the death red that engulfs
these landscapes, ignoring
codes and rules and coats-of -arms.

I watch this chaos shatter crosses, flatten churches,
destroy saints, bishops, kings and queens. Each dark
mortar hole is filled with new tint--viscous oil that
spans this millennium and back to the last.
Over and over, each decade finds a new fallen hero.

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THE MIND, HAVING LOST IT’S BALANCE

That’s not the way it started.
Don’t believe it when they tell you
about the human remains, left behind
the school in disarray, bones picked clean.

There weren’t any bones. Only the wisp
of bones, white ghosts entwined with moldy
leaves, bugs falling through them, light shining
over them in a hazy, late-afternoon glow.

There wasn’t a scuffle. No digging of heels into
the soft earth, no bruising, no blood shed, no
sounds to mix with the blue jay screeching, cicada
clicking and mangy, flea-infested squirrel chattering.

The newspapers are lying. It’s about creating a wild
sensation, a chance to make money, freak people out,
bring notoriety to the town, get kids out of school,
prove a point, build a case, but it’s really all for nothing.

Are you sure you can make me remember?

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MEMENTO

There is this place inside my body, the same place
where I cry, where I feel pride, where no uncertain
measures of the heart occur. Where I may feel lonely
or on occasion, strangely wounded.
It’s like how you can slide underneath the skin
of your fingernail with something thin, so thin
you don’t even realize until you feel the pain biting
into your heart. No, not your heart—that place
beneath it, so deep you can’t breathe.
You catch the air in your chest, deep,
with that sharp intake of wincing breath,
and everyone stops to look at you.
In that same place—the very same tender place,
I carry the hope of you,
the enduring, everlasting,
romantic hope of you.