Lisa Shao

Puggy

The World Tree

My eyes aboard your massive beauty crane
to scan your tangled trellis, sprouting a
thousand green sails on your wing leaf mane.
You may as well be Yggsdrasil with squirrels gay
and romping root to root, messengers afoot.
The dirt in your endless cracking scars like soot
or rather jewels that feed the living from the dead.

I envy you, erected like a wood-carved fortress,
framing the outskirts of a certain upstate yard.
Your stalks, covered in life traipsing through your grooves profess
a kind of worldliness I cannot name, for lack of worthy words.

You bask in shreds of calm and strife
etching aged boughs against the graying light

122

The Hawk Among the Races

Like a stone castle to its base
he is bound to the branch,
they watch

the billion synchronized eyes staring up
for that gnarly mantle
on which he sits

chest high, he meets their massive
gaze through wayward limbs
and contemplates

messages in foreign tongues,
as their breaths deepen ,
and the stillness among them
rises

Abstract Snow Day

Small boy	mitten-clad	shuffles feet	in wall niche
Outside	snow digs 	deeply 
 
Upstairs	firewall	painterly 	artist's loft
ponders 	wounded squirrel-man

Outside 	snow digs 	deeply

The Rising

A raw morning awakens,
dewy and irritable,
to the gradual holler of
the crisp yellow shell.
The fire is lit and beneath
the seat of the grass
the ground wriggles,
beckoned by beak and claw,
set off by the rising.

Green blades are shining
high above the march of
miniature armies screaming
barely
audible
cadences.

And everywhere everyone bites down
as Earth
brandishes her beauty

Gypsy Money

Bottle tops and golden tipped espadrilles
belly dance
chocolate spun kettle corn eaten in
blue sedan jalopy or gleaming Lincoln Town car

Smooth speech and raffle handed handiness
foreign sheets and street side performances
truth tucked in fire-resistant bottles
next to old fire fly fascination

Dancing feet and spirits hot with goldenrod
salmon bits and flecks of shiny hair
Eyes walking sumptuously
roaming alongside highways

The Commute

Milo Blah fails wonderfully as he
moves to shake the life out
of sprigs and miniature leaves while
hulking heavy-handed cliches
to a Tuesday morning meeting.
He cannot wait to trace his way
home to his decorative suburban den
for a stream of bourbon and even later
nightcap, to melt off the cackling spurs
multiplying on his way.

More Botox Please

A Hefty helping of ingredient X
for this seaweed wrapped heiress,
sacrifices teeming through chic wallets
and fragile bones, yet still injects her
macrobiotic lunch and shifts a lasic eye toward
the gold rimmed piping hot waitress with buns of
steel mesh

More Botox please and spritzers,
possibly made quick,
in between veneer appointment
and chatting up waifs in turquoise stilettos

Bruises around lips expected to subside
in time for microdermabrasion at 10 tomorrow
the spritzers miss, hurry now.

Alice in Underland

Lemon haired pumpkin hued maiden
wooed by shiny loot
tailed a rather rancid hare in bowler hat
sifting air for that
silver silhouette, Cartier.

Huffed puffed even, rowed red rotting oars
through River Styx where she
opened a tab
only to lose said hare.

Convenient doe
sultry Alice, garter riding low,
managed high tea and sticky rice with a
large hatchet handed hooded man
with sour breath and a wicked sense of
hubris.

The grim hooded fellow begged Alice tour the sites,
and so she took in light shows in the bone exhibit
featuring ghastly glowing skulls and a plethora
of acrobatically inclined fossilized limbs.
She glimpsed the hare
among crania and bolted sideways

Tiring, she dragged a sleepy left foot
after that watch
into the most peculiar display of caves iced
through and through all slick and frozen
except for the noisy flock of
pink bellied hogs fluttering about
the gigantic stalactites

Crazy rabbit ran Alice into
a frenzy as she skidded her way through
that frigid cavern, into, on my word,
an adjacent room of raging fires
where tiny men in red caped suits raved
with other tiny men in white suits
and diluted halos

They carried on, that Hare and she,
passing men passing time pushing
hearty rocks this way and that, through
timeless tunnels, and rooms and rooms of
large scale Pee Wee Herman digital wall paper,
chasing an itch and nothing more.