Creative Nonfiction Blog by Brenda Gaines Hunter

what waits to be saved

Her nothingness lingers
in the moonlight.

Who are you?
"Love me. I challenge you,"
she answers softly.
How does it feel?
"We had to meet here.
No one's to blame. Hell
is cool in the summer
breeze of the effluents
that blow off the Chicago
River, the flow
life tosses back
into the black waves
billowed from the smokestacks
of the past."

My Poetry

This is my vanity corner. I guess the entire blog really is. I'm taking another break to do as I like.  I'm not much of a poet, but I don't want lose the copies of the poems I wrote that I can find.

Summer Camp

...and you're what strolled
off to summer camp; a failure
of my imagination returned
as old news
bound by a rubberband.
Many people have a drug addiction
surprisingly like your eyes. It was bivouac,
me guarding a hope chest
in an area in need of urban renewal,
trying to figure out how to survive
the wilderness called dating. I learned to
paint by numbers, to arrange
the tin cup, the lantern, and the rocks
around the fire. Pleasure craft
docked next to my tugboat. I ate rations
while you slept with someone else, because
you were lonely,
because she had money for gas,
because it gets cold at night
in the desert. Winter in July.
I weathered the wind and rain; cool air
nipping my nose, where your kiss
should have been. I am
now a conscientious objector, the red flag
hoisted above my head. I surrender.

September 27, 1997

Gypsy At Sea

Here I am,
trying to steer a dinghy through the open sea.
My ego's stealing the horizon,
possessing the scene. Masts of knotted bedclothes
rigged to a rudder are the gifts of a wandering god,
the lost child in a family of angels.

Circe turned Odysseus into swine,
led him to wander for ten years after the war,
til she gave him direction. If I could find Circe,
I'd change her name
and make her mine. I'd call her My Longing.

I don't know where I am anymore
or how to find the I the sea usurps. My imagination
clings to the horizon, creates survival from the moral of my own fable
as well as the buzzards circling above.
When uninterrupted by the sensual world, precision of detail
haunts. My mind tries to feel it's way by touch to land. Archipelagos
pebbling through fog, immeasurable distance
that lay claim to the I  I call Wanting. You have to lose
yourself to be found,
leave fingerprints on froth and clouds, graffiti
for the gods, so they'll know you were here,
claim a part of the sensual world
you don't understand. Those are my claw marks
defining the waves.