Ken Farrell
Waygate eyes say
the middle seat is hers,
her smile, a deft athame.
Tortoise shell: is that
what her glasses are called,
this girl next to me on the plane?
Her end-flipped, short black hair:
topiaried?… a dozen ravens
effusing from a shadowy cloud.
I know nothing of people, how people
meet or talk. Here is someone
I would like to meet over and again,
but with what words to begin?
Do I tell her I find trees dubious
…or ask her how je te dis
“merde” makes sense?
Should my tongue conjure a word,
the first in a language uttered just for us?
If I don’t speak,
where will I find her?
Her shaker-shingled cottage
waits in an aspen hollow outside town
brightened by skylights and filled
with books, her long brown blazer
laid across a chairback
and not a cat in sight.
She is gone too much for such
an entanglement, hang-gliding
over the astral plane, gathering
Yōkai in Aokigahara,
or on a deep-sea survey where she discovers
a fish that subsists on inert dreams
and now it bears her name.
What is her name?
Am I dreaming her, this girl
next to me on the plane?…this piper of souls
with tourmaline and turquoise
oval-stoned rings hugging
each long finger, this be-birded sorceress
flashing a black-stoned tongue-ring
hiding many so wonderful secrets.
***
Ken Farrell’s work is forthcoming/published in journals such as Sport Literate, The Piltdown Review, The Offbeat (poetry prize winner, selected by Heid E. Erdrich), Pilgrimage, The Texas Poetry Journal, Writer’s Bloc, Connections, and anthologized with Arachne Press. Ken Holds an MFA from Texas State University and an MA from Salisbury University, has earned bread as an adjunct, server, professional cage fighter, and pizzaiolo, and for most of the past ten years, Ken has worked in a warehouse. He is currently busy with family and revising and shopping poetry and short fiction manuscripts, and in response to a challenge from his daughter who participated in NaNoWriMo, Ken recently began his first novel.