PB Rippey
PB Rippey's poetry and fiction appears or is forthcoming in journals such as, Zyzzyva, Pool, Phoebe, Chaparral, Askew Poetry Journal, anderbo.com, The Pedestal Magazine, Runes, Mary, Slope, Santa Barbara Independent, Poetry NZ, The Chattahoochee Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2007 Abroad Writers Conferences Poetry Fellowship and the author of the poetry chapbook, Nightmares With Moons, from Pudding House Press. PB is currently house hunting for her novel and completing a full length collection of poems. A 7th generation Californian, she currently lives in the hottest pocket of the West San Fernando Valley, where she dreams daily of cooling her heels in tide pools. Her writing blog is pbwrites.wordpress.com.


Run

Sun the fog’s ball snagged by a suburban barrier
of giraffe-necked palms. My lawn in recess: churched
(this formal stillness, fog-tuned).
My lawn is Winter’s readied bride, her chill-
wrap tight over tips, her delicate sweat.
Here, the deciduous
mutter off leaves by the evening’s folding light
as I watch 2 boys chasing impulse
in cold separating the fog, setting the moon
risen so early in her hypocrisy of flaws
(O pocked resilience).
Run, run.
Their rocket gasps, blood-worked,
tidal energy
pushed the length of my yard’s
walls of safe. I search for comfort
in time-traveling domesticity and grippable
martyrs: books I resented others
owning until I arrived
in this swatch of breathy Eden, clueless.
Cold frills the air. I watch
the Cyclops bent on counter-
clockwise logic, its eye’s glass-cuts
old trickery I won’t translate. Won’t.
Run. Run.
Sun shatters into anemone sky.
My speck-titans so suddenly famous:
they in their pink hides, I in my cloak-bane,
howling
with half-sight, knocked (I get: you),
ever on the chase.


 


© 2013 P.B. Rippey
P.B. Rippey was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the June 2013 Second Sunday Poetry Series