Pick Your Two Favorite Worst Words Here

Gristle. Pus.
Oh, rotten apples in my brain.

These are words cannot be caught in purple valley.

I think it’s weird and all that’s sane, or seeming sane, this is what we’ve got of
what we got.
How hard life is and just endured, and what else is just the do.
And losing memory, losing you is just the same
as when you took me to your office, age of early blue…
I played the Dictaphone,
and a woman named Tess took me to the gift shop.
Bought me a bag, a bowl, of goldfish.
Never had junk food before.
Heat in my own room.

We can pick and choose our words and games most careful.
Thankful we don’t have to say the ones we don’t like if we don’t want.

Thankful for the cleanse of needless things would clot our blood.
Thankful for the strange subdue that gets us through.
I need you, who else will take me to
an office and record our subdued voices?

I didn’t know the meanings of those words when first I heard them, young. But something in me struggled with the very noises. Gristle. Pus. Then sound and sense did marry, and bad things, turned vibrant, corpuscular, sound and saving.

My favorite word is
mallow.

At least today.

Bring forth the purple valley. Fill it with bees, musk, and beetles.
Like the garden you left behind, what still grows madly gorgeous, as if to say
This is what you get to have.

***

Mussels on Oysters

The one percent will be saved in the apocalypse, and
Ninety-nine percent of that, “o whelk,” they say, “shall thirst!”
(This gone-out-dancing one percent is a
Vile-rooted, spatted-footed, inedible limpet.)

But one percent of the that
that’s Good, is the
Grit,
Inside a clammy closet shoe
When the foot ain’t in it.
Stone, cold sleeping, minding nothing but its own, till
A piece gets in its tongue to make the pearl.
Rewarded thus, this child with the impediment will cry out “Thank you!”

The lisping haven’t worked for ages. “Same old thit.”
Making shiny takes a lot out
of a girl.

If she’s really Thor, my fellow bearded maidens, nearly adrift with unshod toes:
Rub her down. Then
hand her what she calls her Thammer, and watch her smash the jewels commissioned.
She’d rather bust them all than listen to the news.
Then –
Lame, the unholy and the wicked shell game broke under the coconuts, crisp and hoary to her
Limp lipid, like wax and oil upon the water, will still float.

Oh “Making Thiny” makes for weakened ecosystem.
Forsaken girl, without a filter, can’t get no work today, when all is broke.
Yea wait, you few who think you set-and-slaked, relifting ladle to the punchbowl fore we’ve any.

Welk and foul will
Come the stench!
off
Chesapeake and Coffin Bays. The fruit won’t grow, the hops, the rye die young.

Without clean water, shriek the cleaning women, zero percent survives.

You’ll find her, this rare and gritty gull, upon the shoreline, speaking what was just the language of the birds.
An emissary to save us, walking on cracked shells. Feeling no pain.

This is the Good, detangling junk necklace from the osprey’s neck.
This is the Good, would cater to a duck.

***

Sara Barnett, born in Oakland, CA and raised in the wilds of New England, honed her craft in New York City. An emerging multi-published writer and poet as well as professional actor, more of her creative exploits (including full list of international publications) can be found here: SARABARNETT.NET