Ralph Monday- Three Poems

The Gray Owl

Aberration, this owl, gray as a Scottish sky.

A Dark Wood Owl, the Spectral Owl,

twin sister, she hunts, like you, at dusk. Her keen

ears can hear prey stirring underneath

the snow, like your ears can hear the laughter

of your target at the bar sipping an icy drink.

She soars on silent wings, a gray ghost

dropping from a bombardier’s sights. Your wings

are a swishing dress, territorial call clicking heels,

soft voice like music slowly stirred. Her claim of space a

confident whooo-ooo-ooo-ooo in the boreal forest.

If the prey is small, swallowed whole. Larger

prey torn to pieces by talons sharp as the

laminate adorning your fingers.

She will take the kill to her nest, as will you.

Tonight, both will eat.

The Curse      

No rain can wash me clean. Water refuses any

baptism. It is the race so cursed by

imagination carrying us all along like bits

of wood caught in forever swirling eddies.

The dark, a murky sludge filled stream is the

challenge, one that has ridden us since

stories were sung around campfires heralding

the battle of light and dark the sun faced

each day as it sank into the underworld.

This fancy is the burden weighing down

our minds. We find it as scrys: in pots of

gold, empty grails, bars and homes,

cathedrals and bordellos, forest and matted

garden. No matter where we walk, the

underworld follows, laughing like some

vampiric clown after it swallowed the sun.

No answer heralds the dawn. No angel

comes with a protective sword. Only

monstrous myth sustains, a top hat filled

with pyrite. These stories we have narrated,

these choraled songs, women weeping by

the river—call of Calvary’s hill, or in

another time, Orpheus’ lyre—bring us respite

from an uncertain dawn.

Marked

The first tattoo was a death head stitched

into my left ass cheek after I had sex

in a graveyard.

Number two came after a binge a few years

later: Patsy Cline on my right forearm so I

could remember “Crazy,”

the lover who taught me about

needles and spoons, night that was more

than darkness, and later hate.

I mark myself so that I may forget—more

importantly remember when I need to know

what the crunch of broken glass in an alley

meant. Layer by layer over the years like

the phases of the moon, being inked became

graduation rituals to a new me

that I had to remember. The clichéd yin and yang

karmas the back of my neck, an Ouroboros,

slithered red, yellow, black, rings my navel

as I eternally return to my own self-creation,

eating myself on a banquet table of

colored skin.

My entire body now a tapestry of transitions,

color like a blazing autumn forest, my roots

drink deep the remembering of my markings.

But in marking, I am marked: strangers approach

like family and make comments about how beautiful,

how weird, how ugly my body is.

I realize that we all have been marked from the beginning,

in the garden, the inquisitor’s chamber, marriage bed—

marked by our sex, our desires, our patented roles.

These tattoos mere totems covering soft flesh like

a cherub’s husk, the others staring like a Cyclops,

we all walk within marked days.

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, cc&d, 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 chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014.