Patty Seyburn

Bo Peep Synecdoche 

         
          In dreams, still often alone.

The subconscious sometimes run by God’s adjuncts, sometimes by that guy
with sleeves at the coffee 

shop’s corner table scribbling notes you can’t see in a way some call
furiously.

            I descended the stairs and saw a monster.

And when I looked up, a shepherdess crook affixed to the ceiling, dappled in blood.
Cue the ominous scale. 

Her prop stood in for her: a part for the whole, her symbol. Probably 
more metaphor 

            but who doesn’t like the word synecdoche? Who?

The monster had no prop, was a prop, a symbol
of what might scare you, like being alone.

It was time to wake up and I did
because every citizen of the dream had done their job, 

            performed with verve, clocked out, and left my waking self to cower

in a bedroom in the northwest 
section of Detroit in the late 60s.

When the monster and hook lost
their potency, a hand beneath the bed
 
            replaced them, a horse
 
galloping away with me gripping its mane and finally, 
a siege and quiver 

of small yearnings that would leave me on waking,
wanting, or 

            not leave me at all.

---

May It Please the Court

No two consecutive consonants
          create words with every vowel.
I found this flaw while driving
          a therapeutic toll-road
that threatened the environs
          of the Cali gnatcatcher, bird
with an obvious purpose.
          The sign said Fog Possible Ahead
and I was not disappointed
          the way God keeps disappointing
me though I keep this in a thought
          behind a thought where it’s hard
to see. There was fog, not
          the high-beam, crawl-the-road
kind but a healthy mist and one
          good hill that, were it the end
of the flat planet, we would not
          have seen our demise coming.
Fog, in my addled cerebellum,
          went fig and I searched for
the others then ran through every
          consonant and those proximal.
It only two took exits on
          this newly constructed artery
and now I wonder where I was
          going before the morning’s
reveal as you may wonder
          where I am going with this.
Lord of Lexicon, the English
          alphabet is poorly ordered.
For your consideration: place
          b and g next to each other
resulting in bag beg big bog bug,
          five words solid as the rocks
flipped over in the ocean
          that we now stand on, admiring
the view. Five words that do
          their own work with no
connection. I leave the rest
          ​to the linguists. Their kind made
this mess at Babel. The English
          speaker coined “confounded”
and spoke with such authority,
          ​no one said, what’s up with
the two vowels? Why is one just
          along for the ride? Now we pay
for this recklessness with letters
          that do not get along with neighbors.
If they cannot, why should we?
          I pull over to wait for clarity.

---

Shirley at 94

The morning gave me a free carwash
with a coupon for one of those bandaged clouds
 
that temper the light and my daughter’s hair
is a fountain.
 
I took the Boba straw – I always take
the wrong straw. This one with greater capacity
 
than this beverage needs. My needs often
above average, though no better than yours.
 
I cannot defend the divine.
I cannot divine the defensible
 
but I can divide by two and know
a prime number when I see one.
 
It’s an even-number year, ma
and you would be even-numbered.
 
This is a strange habit, thinking
how old you would be.
 
The conditional a sorrowful tense
along with the pluperfect.
 
The Latin perfect is something that occurred
in the past. The pluperfect combines
 
past tense with the perfect. You and I
far from perfect, ma. Often tense: we had not
 
figured out what counted.
A very small girl with very big sunglasses
 
draws water from a ceramic tank
that looks like a map of uncharted terrain.
 
She is pre-regret, owning no past
tense. I now pull my hair back
 
from my face, as you had wanted.

--
Patty Seyburn has published five collections of poems: Threshold Delivery (Finishing Line Press, 2019); Perfecta (What Books Press, Glass Table Collective, 2014); Hilarity, (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002), and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She is a professor at California State University, Long Beach.