Ralph Monday- Three Poems

No Return

I know that you are not alone because

an ill spirit blows through the house like some

ghost ship, transparent to the eye, bone felt

in the dust of ages where chi connects

perished and the living in networks of

tangled karma manifest in flesh, nerve,

an unseen whirlwind drawing you like a

black hole sucking you toward the event

horizon, point of no return. Then the

day will be lost. You cannot return to

me. Sail with the thing you embraced that has

only a body of flesh and bone, all

else inside, a wrecked ship eaten by rats—

so many holes no pitch can ever make sound.

Never Mate with Aliens

This is the new world order where those

are dumb to knowing their own kind.

They ferret out the soft skin of others

like buying a bar of soap. Forage for them

in shopping malls, late night bars, Match.com

or any other pixelated people market, even

churches.

The yellow brick road is lost along with white

picket fences. Not the death of god that is cause;

rather, death of self, thought’s extinction, Eliot’s

world nearly a century later.

So, they mate in their own wasteland: backseats

on lonely roads, bedrooms clothed in animal

blankets, wet earth, heaving and moaning on

the tomb of insects.

They do not know there is despair in these desperate

couplings—wet skin sounds sliding through

unrequited flesh, momentary appeasement through

genital hordevores, arrows all in the hunt, gone away

sweating, confused, lacerating collars put around

their own necks, for to mate with aliens, never

knowing one’s own kind, is to be on the muddy

sediment of the Marianas Trench—

dark dark without a glass, no ship in sight.

Mermaids in Snow

As I drove, all around this mountain road,

snow fell like salt shook from a giant's

shaker. I had asked for reconciliation

on the cell for what seemed a thousand

pleas—no more than rotted apples spit

like poor entertainment on a reality show.

You laughed, you said, at my insane antics

for the last time. Your medical mind dissected

the text messages you found late at night

while I slept—a mental scalpel slicing through

the barbaric cuneiform script of a lover's perishing

dreams, words that may as well have been

buried in sand.

A romantic idiot you called me, chasing my

petrified youth in the siren's call of bloody

lipstick, the skirt like a guillotine lopping

off my lost head because this was a revolution

I could not win. Don't call again, you said.

Forgot all those years. Your aims are mermaids

in snow—never finding them there—misplaced

pitiful, maimed creatures. The sea is the place,

you said, a river-ocean left long ago.

Bio: Ralph Monday is an Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing courses. In fall 2013 he had poems published in The New Plains Review, New Liberties Review, Fiction Week Literary Review, and was represented as the featured poet with 12 poems in the December issue of Poetry Repairs. In winter 2014 he had poems published in Dead Snakes. Summer 2014 had a poem in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology of Best Present Day Poems. His work has appeared in publications such as The Phoenix, Bitter Creek Review, Full of Crow, Impressions, Kookamonga Square, Deep Waters, Jacket Magazine, The New Plains Review, New Liberties Review, Crack the Spine, The Camel Saloon, Dead Snakes, Jellyfish Whispers, Pyrokinection, Red River Review, Burningword  and Poetry Repairs. Featured Poet of the week May, 2014 Poetry Super Highway. Forthcoming: Poems in Blood Moon Rising. Crack the Spine best of anthology and Down in the Dirt Magazine. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Houghton Mifflin’s “Best of” Anthologies, as well as other awards. A book, Empty Houses and American Renditions will be published by Hen House Press in Fall 2014.