Marissa Cook

Professor Palmer
English 190
Fall 2013
Ode to the Kneaded Eraser

you fold like clay

or dough;
though you drink
charred dark errors,
you open,
grow like mold,
swallow
and show your core:
unstained,
a clean gray soul.

The Song of the Crab Apple

Stunted haggard gnarled growth
Twisted roiling by the earth
Those weedy upstarts touched the sky
The acorned oak, the knobbly pine
As for me, I kept to myself, I stayed
Smart and hugged the ground.
Theyre rotting stumps all crumble-ing now:
Spongy bug-bored putrid brown.
Their bodies built the old red barn,
Red paint thats peeling like a scar.
(Its rotted, too.)
As for me, grew old alone
In this flat plain rusted home
My apples crabbed and then they crumpled
Tumbled in an unpicked muddle
to the crinkled dried-out grass.
Candy-red
sour-green
marred and blighted soft skin browning,
Beacon for the stinging drones,
Gnawed-in mushing wormy holes,
And I bloom in cankered buds,
And let my ragged leaves all buzz,
Scuttled with a stunted limp,
But dont you underthink my grip
Ill be a blight
A clump a thlump
Of waste-fruits mestered in
the Blar-ring yellow sun.
(Thats my revenge.)
Last year I had that big
sandpaper hive
Bulge in my Bowers.
Gem-sting whining, swarming bumbles
Rankled apples make you stumble
A solid slip, a fumbling flump,
On the garbage In the mud
Snagged by the twigs you all forgot.

Fade
The car rolled ahead through the gray morning. Clouds coated the horizon. Not a sliver of
sun.
I sat in the back seat and listened vaguely to the rotations of the engine, the high whine of
the air cleaved by our shining metal bubble, and surveyed the fleeting scenes, eyes catching an
object for a heartbeat only to have it swing away, fading into the fogged past.
The ribbon-smooth surface of the road grew coarse. I sat up straighter. The clouds rolled
a darker shadow over the sky; stray tears of rain splattered the windshield.
Here the scenery had changed, gray to match its funereal backdrop. And outside my window stretched a gray building, low as the bands of clouds, with steps spilling down into the
street. It was a school that had been shut down a few years ago, but the building left to rot. Some
windows had been boarded up, but others were dark voids with splintered glass edging. The iceclear shards littered the ground with the brown murk of broken beer bottles, nestled in the sparse,
bold weeds that slowly grew cracks in the cement.
I imagined I might see a face in the depths of the shadowed interior. There was nothing.
There was nothing on this road at all. The houses on the opposite side, sheltered by diseased elms, were deserted and faded, with brittle beams and paint cracking. They had once been
rich and gorgeous, lace in the windows, delicate moldings along the roof lines, generous front
porches, but now they sat silent and rotting, ghosts from the last century.
Beside me, my sister asked about the school.
They shut it down, my dad explained from the drivers seat. They cut the funding
Pontiac is dying.
Dying. Spoken so casually. I watched the patchwork asphalt pass underneath us, my head
hammocked in the slack of the seat belt, so much cobwebbed history crumbling to dust outside,
in a different world. I imagined sitting there on the weed-claimed sidewalk, by the tar of abandoned cigarette butts and the grains of glass. Watching that slow death, a terrifying fade, like
slipping downhill.
But in a flash the school had passed us by, and the houses, and the elderly trees. The
wheels turned a steady rhythm. They were swept behind us, into the faded past. The road curved
down a hill.