Global Warning

by Nancy Gauquier

Mother Nature is mad,
The Goddess is roaring,
Kali is dancing in a whirlwind,
the Furies are spinning
storm clouds of incredulity
at the stubbornness of narrow
mechanical minds possessed
by some mythical bottom line.

Apathetic billionaires are caught
up in their game, as they mock
people with poverty, stick them
with shards of broken dreams,
and complain with pockets full
of fool's gold, cook their waffles
in crude oil, and toss in nightmare
beds full of the hungry and homeless
human collateral of their markets.

Mother Nature is mad.
She is gathering her forces.
The Goddess knows the devastation
of the human heart,
Kali wanders among the war dead,
the uncounted children,
victims of the drones.

Insatiable corporations
pump out their poisons,
spinning shrouds of dark clouds,
as the mercury is rising,
the ice caps are sinking,
and the polar bears drown
in a dying sea.

Treadmill

by Nancy Gauquier

My father was the son
of his father’s step-daughter,
who died young, like her mother.
“Worked to death,” my mother said,
my father never talked about them,
he was raised by the housekeeper,
and worked in factories
from the time he was eight years old,
except for when he fought
in two wars, and by the time
I got to know him, he was half-deaf
from bombs that burst his eardrum,
and limped on one shrapnel-deformed foot.
My macho father, who chain-smoked,
coughed his guts out every morning,
and boasted continually of every fight,
who coached little league and badgered his sons
into stubborn walls of reproach.

My mother struggled through the sixth grade,
during the depression, there were years when
they couldn’t afford to go to school,
I never saw her read anything,
except Sears catalogues
and True Confessions magazines,
raised as the only daughter
of a father who doted on her,
and beat his wife.
Trapped in a treadmill
of futile attempts to keep up
the facade of the happy suburban life,
she juggled bills like meteoric balls
to keep them from falling,
and crushing us all.

Seven children, five survived,
hostages of a marriage gone wrong -
my father, the soldier, the proud warrior -
my mother, the Puritan with the Victorian
figurines and angels guarding their room,
for my father, sex was another conquest,
for my mother, another defeat,
after she had her last child,
I could hear her slap him in the bedroom,
“Richard, stop it,” she would say.
“The children . . .”
as if we were all gathered
with ears pressed to the door.              

Demotic Psychotic

by Nancy Gauquier

Seven years as a cashier in a tourist shop at Pier 39,
I mean, hey, I've sold enough wind chimes,
now I'm going crooked, bent, squiggly,
off key, off time, no valentines,
no sympathy, no symphony, no symmetry,
no sugar in my tea, stark raving surreal
meta-counter-yin/yang-impossibility.
If I need to commune with nature,
when I'm out of my tree,
I pull leaves out of my ears,
spit river rocks out of my oceanic mouth,
hop on the wild white stallion of my mind,
and ride.