Two Poems by Audrey Towns

Even catacombs of cacti with broken bowels push daisies.
beaks nurse nectar from their verdant lobes cradled
near cracked areoles, cochineal youths entombed in
bony spines, a festoon of feathers hiraeth for hummingbird hearts,
the lacuna of drumming echoed in long-ago fluvial formed
barrancas of breached bellows, drowning in desiccated
desserts of stone where mortar and pestle grind
fresh herbs for Darwin’s feast of fitness, their children carmine
for foreign tapestries, a death whistle woven through the loom.

As brute beaks break their tender skin, what name do they beseech
when each trip around the sun equates transformation with consumption?
Morrigan? Mars? Apophis? Odin? They have beaks of their own,
feasting upon the slippery skin of Pelops.
          Such cycles make meals of our children,
small ivory shoulders heavy with Demeter’s distraction and Myrtilus’s
malevolence. Gone, the crimson cadence of their cores, lost
to the scorched seas of war, now tomb to the ill-fated dog, her bark
a breathless warning bloomed from parched blue lips, a sibyl
from frothed laurel-eating throats, poison turned to prophecies,
spreading like tendrils of yellow rot in empty stems, a nostrum of violence
quenched by the liquor of lament, torched eyes guiding
like a north star for travelers weary of revenge,
          navigating dark turbulent waters,
a tempest of tears their triumph.

Stars ascend and fall still wearing thick thorn crowns of ancient
cacti or the cochineal robes of conquest; unity is not all hymns of hope.
Grief, breaking and branching from polyped pores,
ribs yawning, callus ripened, not offered, but eaten, where finely formed
glochids pierce neighbor’s dominion, rash spreading, inflamed.

Those closest to the fires of Niflhel water roots with searing
cauldrons of grief, Pair Dadeni, reborn mute, intimate
prayers without alter, they weep ambrosia potions.
How good are tears, how sweet are dirges,
repatriation of splintered flesh, transformation without consumption,
Ι would rather sing dirges
than eat or drink.
 
Through throttled throats held tight, cries
rising, vibrating in the chasm
of their chests, tongue-splitting
siphons, rattling, raging
into a lore of lament
 
and protest