mnartists.org: Kathleen Heideman

Come Sunday, The Dog of His Thoughts Will Bury Something Unspeakable In Your Muddy Garden

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:00:45 GMT

First published in 100 Words (Volume 5 no. 6). ...................... Come Sunday, The Dog Of His Thoughts Will Bury Something Unspeakable In Your Muddy Garden Dearest Christ, how's the new job coming -- administrative assistant, you said? did my last postcard mention how the tulips are poking up their ruddy erections from every corner of the yard? so many, I forgot the humus held so many! though it's too soon for bloom -- cruel spring -- remember the rose which should have graced my back gate eternally, "Paul's Ever blooming Scarlet, winter-hardy to zone 3," -- the one I mail-ordered from Gurney's? It froze. But then a seed catalogue is a list of the deceased and not a bible. (Or a bible too, you think?) Bless me, but I get confused.

A Light Like Fireflies

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:12:17 GMT

Published in the anthology Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation (Wising Up Press, 2007). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Light Like Fireflies Forgive her, but she needed a light like fireflies, those martyred bulbs burning themselves out in captivity --- she believed in something back then, black-olives for pupils, reading books by bug-lamp, her skin spark-green from that jar of heat lightning blinking beside her pillow. A childhood illuminated by insects: forgive her, but she believed luminosity would hover like a winged butler, forever at her shoulder. She wasn't ready to lose faith, thumbprints on her forehead: the holy soot of naivete, loneliness, several cities that could have used a few fireflies. In war, she smeared herself black to remain invisible. Shadows said which prayers to hum and how many times each. Cassocks absolved her sins. Timeclocks doled out rewards. In the dark, she nodded, she waited. Dull decades went by, nothingness & moonlessness. Then a curtain was pulled and she went blind --- ! friends were reading aloud "Sister, how unearthly!" --- see that glow worm undulating through leaves, how on its forehead there burned a light like a green star --- ? and she did see it! Yes! The sun was burning wormholes in the deep white snow outside their window, the words, the brilliance overwhelmed her, she confused the floor with heaven and fell back against the wall --- it was pure poetry, pure Spirit, the same jig her father danced when she was younger, when his screwdriver touched a wire in the transformer box and six cheap inches of screwdriver puddled onto his work-boots, mercurial; Forgive her. It always happens like this. High-voltage fireflies flash --- then everything goes black, as in Caravaggio's painting of Paul on his back in the ditch. In that moment, we are undone, knocked to the ground, the everyday world suddenly dark and upside down and only the crushing potential of our faithful horse, that filly named "Doubt," fully illuminated.

application: A Light Like Fireflies (PDF)

The Transfiguration Box

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:07:56 GMT

Published in the anthology Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation (Wising Up Press, 2007). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transfiguration Box --- it's a mean little tin filled with claws and hairballs and everything else I ever tried to lose: blood-stained snippings of a straw broom, four too-memorable wine corks, and that dog's back molar crumbling into death --- a worthless nugget of domesticated calcium, really, but it resembled the way I held on tight. Even architectural drawings, those violet plans for a bridge we never built between us. And the perch-bones I threw away so many times but found, always, floating like a warning in the toilet bowl or reclined luxuriously on the butter; and those roaches I couldn't kill, so I sealed them into drops of molten amber, fossils that hardened as the sap cooled. Husks of dead sin grown permanent as a gemstone, and secret potentials: an egg under glass, framed by yellowed lace and penny nails and resting in its nest of short hairs. Intimacy. An avocado pit painted golden; saintly camouflage, a round flame to warm the heart. And a locked drawer with three tallow candles given to me by an elderly plumber who promised as his fingers found mine "They light up the dark places, honey, and they burn for so long..." To get at the candles, though, I'd need a little key. Perhaps that tarnished one that hangs from its brass string singing "Remember me --- ? Remember me --- ?"

application: Transfiguration Box (PDF)

The Edible Marie Antoinette

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Published in the spring issue of Steam Ticket (literary review published by the University of Wisconsin La Crosse), April 2008. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Edible Marie Antoinette Excerpt: "This note is just to say check the top shelf, dear, I baked you a bundt cake, a cake in the shape of a woman in skirts wide as an over-turned bowl. The lavender frosting was impulsive, yes, and by now you will have noticed the detail work..."

A Mapped Route to the Island of __________

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:31 GMT

Poem will appear in the forthcoming anthology of literary responses to string theory: Riffing on Strings (Scriblerus Press, 2008), anticipated in June. Inspired by the M.I.N.O.S. neutrino project taking place in northern Minnesota's Soudan Mine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Mapped Route to the Island of __________ Excerpt: "Was there fog? Can I blame my navigation errors on an ordinary layer of interference -- say the moon was luminous at first, large as the eye of a lighthouse, only clouds came later? Well, then, yes. It is possible to paddle purposefully for hours and still miss the shore....."

How Top-Secret Warheads Were Moved

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:51:58 GMT

Published in The Tonopah Review (online), Spring 2008 issue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Top-Secret Warheads Were Moved Word of an approaching circus would have spread quickly. No circus posters went up, but kids in every town along the route whispered about convoys, spotted by a hired man or the neighbors, passing: brightly painted trucks like heat-mirages in the distance, diesels rippling through dry hills and deserts on newly-tarred two-lanes, preceded by clown-cars, blinking lights and WIDE LOAD signs, loaded down with canvas tents and tilt-a-whirls, dissembled fairways and Ferris wheels, calliope music disturbing dark flocks of crows. Kids said there were trucks with man-eating tigers painted on the sides, air-cooled, with iron bars to keep the beasts from escaping. Behind all this, grim carnies were sweating in the hot wake, hands clenched as they drove, eyes bloodshot. They never smiled when the trucks paused for fuel; wouldn't say where their mysterious circus was headed or when the big show might finally begin.

Work from the Permanent Collection

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:42:00 GMT

Title poem from the manuscript "Work from the Permanent Collection." Published in Tertulia Magazine, April 2008. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Work from the Permanent Collection Exhibit A: "Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing," a first edition, with a three-inch hole I've drilled through its emptiness. Later, a funeral photo of my great-grandmother: the child she died with, in labor, two boxes of lace and dark foreheads. Further: a room of wounds. Bones of boars from grandfather's swamp, a rosewood pipe his lips knew well, two dozen can-openers his second wife stole from grocery stores (her ten identical hats, and the boxes of Rit dye she hoarded against a life of white sheets). She was a lot like me, except I'm no thief. I save things: a shelf of rusting mis-cut keys, shark's teeth, sea-licked glass, seven pounds of shell shirt buttons, a hundred stained maps, enough white stones for Hansel to find his way home again. I've pulled horse hair from antique sofas, I've kept my teeth. I have cow horns, steer horns, the horn buds of heifer calves. I have hair -- my own, and more, a ponytail I found in the street, half-burned candle nubs, mason jars of winter wood-ash. Not all rooms are dark. The Third Floor features mandrake roots, fruit pits, bundled stems of passion-fruit, sweet buds of tigerlilies. I have the seeds of a common catnip, bristle-pod of moonflower, small eyes of the wild vine that blossoms white on fire-escapes, and there's lungstone and soapstone and bloodstone and shale; fossilized backbones, calcified stems; St. Christopher charms and St. Anthony pins; hundreds of needles in a leather purse; my own toenail clippings and cork floats. More in deep storage, and more in mind. I'm the Curator, finder-keeper-loser-weeper, a guide floating lonely among fish skins, a tackle box of barbed hooks, bobbers and sinkers. Conflicting desires, I mean. Coming inside, friend? I've got a box of wishbones I'm saving for you.... Let's send the guards home early. Let's touch everything.

Knowing Stone from Seed...

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:33:56 GMT

As published in the Minnesota Poetry Calendar (Black Hat Press, 2000)

application: Knowing Stone from Seed...

A Woman Feels the Weight of Love

Kathleen Heideman — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 22:13:21 GMT

("My whole body is not as heavy as the word 'sad'....")

application: A Woman Feels the Weight of Love

The Road from Here to Absolution

Kathleen Heideman — Fri, 14 Dec 2001 20:39:15 GMT

Inspired by a fragment from Robert Bly: [i]"It is said that inside our body there is a vast gap -- perhaps thousands of miles across...."[/i]

application: The Road from Here to Absolution

Signs & Signifiers

Kathleen Heideman — Fri, 14 Dec 2001 16:59:02 GMT

Somewhere in northeastern Wisconsin there was a roadside billboard: "Christ is the Answer -- what is your Question?"....

application: Signs & Signifiers