songanddancegirl

Ghost Ranch

he wears an expensive houndstooth jacket  great shoes

he is scion  +dropdead handsome  scion to dynasty  of

horsethieves  bootleg +bookies   he is horsey too    but not Lauren

she is in black   Rita-esq   would never wear black in life

thought she killed her mother  when poet was 5   Freda in

black cardi at her mother’s deathbed  very superstitious    writings on the wall

her mother’s stroke in a rocking chair  eyes rolled back

oh the horror  poet the small witness   a cousin  who just

died at 97   in Alaska   slapped Rita hard  across the face

these are not their stories anymore  +they are not mine

so why drag ’em around   like filthy rags?   why?  

nature of the fate beast  eh

she wears black regularly now  turtlenecks  slim cropped

trousers  long brown hair   take the ribbon from your hair

rail thin   spirited

she is not my mother anymore  recently freed from bondage

to  children  vomitous-dogs  rake husband   she is fearless

men line up

she flirts brazenly  uses her whip on an as needed basis  while

down here i learn to be motherless   +free of her dependency   not easy

now both on brand new trajectories   glory  glory   Hallelujah! 

will you know my name?  the one  you+Lee  Louis  Ella+Basie

gave to me   Lee  if it’s a girl let’s name her Aprill   the 2 ll’s

blinking  11:11  11:11  11:11    blue lilacs in your hair  i’d know you   anywhere

__

Winter 2025  ..blue lilacs your deathbed song  3:10 am  14/11/22..

There is a popular belief that making a wish when

the clock shows 11:11 is a powerful time for

manifestation 

Teddy & Alvin & the be-pimpled Giant

Alvin was wiry  prison-wiry  how would i have known this

at 9?  there is a leftover danger about some people  a smell

mustyripe   +deadeyed

Father brought him home from the racetrack   how did he

miss that?  Alvin slept in our basement  +could easily have

murdered our family    or molested me

i was often alone with him  as he pumped iron  halfnaked

did you have such visitors  at 9?  then there was Teddy  an

older man  without teeth  quite sweet  he lived in the stalls

nuzzled up against steaming horses  he had the dignity of

a FisherKing   always smiling  +threadbare   i visited often in

said basement  left oreos  cold brisket  +the Diary of Anne Frank

you see Ted was quite lonely  he whispered sweet nothings as

i sat on his knee  english not his first language  all nods+arcane

handsignals    a munchkin vibe for sure

then there was the ravine  pure magic  with giants  a dead

grandfather  +one matricidal child maniac  now serving life

in the asylum next door    Jerry can you hear me?

the Giant lived in a burned-out shack  ungainly+pimpled  quite

Quasimodo  he visited me often  in the weewee hours  my screams

piercing suburban nights    oh he was a taskmaster alright!

swore me to secrecy

no doubt you had

Giant visitations

too

__

Winter  2025  …

will the real Aviva Oonroth please stand up?

i thought i would be a novelist  by now

but it’s just so hard to   make shit up

as my mentor David Donnell  aka Krispin

used to suggest

but Krisp  why make shit up  when my family

reads like a broadway play?  call me  Ishmael

Aviva

daughter of the creek

ravine  shetl  racetrack

ICU’s   circus  bestiary

daughter of the dust

__

..iv’e seen things better not to tell..

(Frank Stanford  poet  1948-1978)

Winter  2025  ..can i get a witness?..

the ubiquitous hearse..aka..kaddish the musical

Frank Stanford  1975  Archives & Ephemera 

i am actually not death-obsessed  what i am is  uber-alive  +this

is why   i flirt with the beast   so to understand   his mysteries

his glory

i expect

my ashes

will continue

to sing

just turn up the volume

come Spring  my name

in 5 languages

if you have watched the final breath  you are intimate with death

3 times the charm   now poet is pals with the Great Reap  who will

creep  over the bedsheets  +kiss her  on a  crepeycheek

(okay..enough with the rhyminmaudlin) 

this the most gentle

inhale/exhale

one will ever meet        

bye bye

the creek was full of tadpoles  later squished frogs on the driveway

(aprill  it’s about the frogs..)  but you didn’t really consider them dead

now flat  +quite beautiful   all black fluid +seeping

53 years later  you ride in the hearsemobile  of your fabulous mother

(not really dead either)  whose rings you wear  cautiously   oh the mystery    

she wore them better  her hands bigger   her heart pure laine  child

Saturday at the ballet  35 dancers deep  weeping +throwing themselves

through a gap in the curtain  blackabyss  when a 1960’s pristine hearse

glides onto the stage (!)   to Ravel’s  Kaddish  1914

your husband’s  ghost stitches  sing

holy radiation burns  aquiver

neither of you flinch   or seep

__

..an artist should carry his death like a priest his breviary..  

( Heinrich Boll  1917-1985  Nobel Prize winner ..dead at 67)

Fall 2025  ..memento mori  eh

we are so lightly here…said Leonard Cohen

are we Len?  i mean yes to: you know she’s half crazy..and that’s why

you wanna be there..  Jack knew too: the only ones for me are the mad

ones..mad to live +burnburnburn..

yet so many rage against the cage

where there’s always free cheese

we are here too heavily  

c’mon   rattle those chains

when the rest of you were busy being children

i was busy being a saviour

of children

of adults

of the world!  

she’s got the whole wide world in her hands

when the rest of you

were being children   i became a monk

(Frank Stanford  Arkansas 1976 ..2 years pre..3 bullets to the heart..at 29)

lately there have been  signs

24 kettling hawks   8 low planes

over the dead

starkdark underbellies

dropping leaflets at the cemetery

SUCKERS!!

a light on this poet’s face  at her bro’s place   at sunrise

for whom does the bell toll   this time?

(sunrise over Frances Atkins’ dead body  circa 2022)

Ernest +Frankie   shotgun suicides  gnaw off a foot to fly  what with all

the testing to see if yer gonna die  cuts insouciance off at the knees   old

brittle gimlet me   fabulous roman candle    descent into bathos ain’t pretty

i know that priest with the giant gut  sucked 14 yr. old Frank’s lifeblood  at

the monkery  flayed him  as boys without fathers  are more vulnerable to be

they always promise refuge   don’t they just

i was pursued like this all my life  

the boy with the wild hair they called me

i made promises to death  + kept them

(Frank Stanford  at 23..)

i am not here lightly   no Holly Go   sailors sold me into captivity  at 3

the dancing she-bear in chains  the girl with the wild hair  of a cajun whore

i knew many children like me  in the trenches of humanity

suckled by lions+tigers+bears   +priests

much like Frankie

poet  swamprat  prey

__

Fall 2025  ..for Frankie & Apesie..

the tailor Muttle Kamzoil

he had a way with words

he had a way with witchywomen

with a football

tallish  handsome

not strong

not the silent type

beautifulloser at heart

this the rub

his father Charlie erased him

before he began the race

SCRATCHED

like the lamed ponyboy

oh his impish grin

+cruelstreak

his rise

and fall   and rise               and fall

his last breaths on a yellowed

florida bed   raggedpallet

ancestor visitations

he spoke  in arcane handsignals

HUT!!!!

sister christian

witness extraordinaire

her bro’s band of angels

all in cleats

she flew home then

to tell

his pretty mama

__

Fall 2025   ..he rises yet..

..but we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.. says Haruki Murakami

No?

why do i write my autofictional narrative/confessional  prose poems?

all diatribe   memoir-esq  +rage   always prone to hyper-vigilance +amygdala

hijack-ers   especially  re:  bugs  serial killers  +narcissists  (what’s the difference?)

they’ll eat you alive  clean your slim bones dry   dem bones  dem bones dem

dry bones   1st 65 years in a rage   last 7 in grief   pandemic  cancer maximus

a brother  and old mother  crept away  +on+on+on    now it’s  rise up time

from perpetual  fightflightfreeze   un-Anna Karenina me  the train already upon

her as she decided  to rise  does memoir try  to pin down the un-pinnable?  nail it

to a cross  where it withers  forever a relic  mementomori

maybe the past shifts +transforms  as we do  how-what-who  is remembered

maybe it’s all a mirage  hallucination  feverdream   did big Paul Paladino exist?

a small time mobster from Buffalo  circa 1968    did bovine Jackie Gaudaur?

(who should rot in hell)

how ’bout blacksonavitch?  poodle extraordinaire  he who spoke 5 languages

held my hand in the night  when parents cussed+squealed  +wild animals entered

the suburban backsplit   made off with my 1st husband   and where now Difranco?

frogman in the Great War  dance teacher  gigolo   your family reads like a 

broadway play!  said my de mentor  who was not fond of  over-rhyme   his

own father in a ward   mother married the handyman  who beat her

..my father is frothing at the mouth..his hair  is disarranged..his eyes crackle

like electrical storms..his fly bursts..his cock emerges huge+wet as a wriggling fish..

my father was a classics specialist and died from a torn heart when i was 9 1/2..

(David Donnell  Water Street Days  1989  Governor General’s Award  for poetry 1983)

Haruki Murakami   these wounds

+their perps  seem to have one helluva

staying-power

which is my hand?

which is hers?

__

Fall 2025  ..at 92  Rhonda  who killed her rabbi husband against a fence..

perpetually begged for a bowl of her mother’s soup.. (true story  inmate #666

Living Life on the Avenue  a now defunct hellhole mirage)

salvationgirl blues

title  compliments of spellcheck gods  a mystical

transformation of  halva  into  salvation  !!  which

i desperately need    but who doesn’t?

halva  a dessert made of sesame seeds  desertdelicacy     open sesame

get me out of here!  one brother had a serious halva crack-up   at 8

as the other bro ran in circles  with a behemoth on his shoulder

(it is still there)

   (where all hoopers learned to flop)

my brothers are nice guys   otherwise   leaning toward the

eccentric  +alienabduction   when the spaceship came they

clambered aboard   willingly

all of this as i herded the other leper messiah + 1 giant black poodle

into the cedar-closet   where we hid among  mother+father’s  clothes

silkgowns  houndstooth  the odd saddle  +some greasy black kief

our parents had fled years earlier  can you blame them?  salvation

it don’t come easy   and it likely doesn’t come at all  according to

buddhists  +stoics  everywhere

but once you know this  you western clingons to immortality   ruin  harm

+loss upon loss  are just lowly words  so fer chrissakes  try suffering them

with dignity   +fuck immortality

__

Fall 2025  ..Happy 5786..🍯  ..oh and there will be no certainty..

tripping the light (is not) fantastic

walking home from a fashionshow  my fave designer’s retiring

women hoarding taffeta dirndls  like they are the 2nd coming

what rough beast on slow thighs stalks me?   (thx W.B.)

in my local park  on this dark moonless night  gibbous waned

to a sliver  then died  (much like my yout)  a small man in black

pops out of the trees  he is menacing  +sidewinder

he glares at me  says he is hungry  just then trumpets blare!  lights

flash  +a giant black spider-y web  attacks my left eye  the guy in

black  tackles me  +begins to rub his tutu on my varicoseveins

as he runs away i hear him say: this bitch can sing!   i’d been crooning

Ziggy Stardust  as the Great Vitreous Detachment of 2025 began  the spider

in my eye  is not my friend   the Mayo says it will cling to me for a year

(the needy bastard)

there is a fragility to this stage of life  a drying out of everything  once

held sacred   lubricants are your friend   walk tall +carry a big dildo stick

(hey where’s your sense of humour?)  oh and do hold your head up  fer chrissakes

__

you’re  still

the greatest

little filly

of them all

(Lee Atkins  August 16  1967)

__

..but now all is different..a sudden moment of darkness at noon..

the ego is a  has been.. (Mid Life  Murray Stein  1983)

Now we Dance!  (Sprockets  Saturday Night Live) 

Fall 2025  ..the snow she’s a coming..

comme des fille

i sit in a Comrags onesie  black  with perfect seaming   a la Miuccia Prada

it gives pointy boobs to anyone over 13   later on Dundas St.  named for

Henry  the slave trader   i enter the temple of citygirl cool

doors closing  forever  at 8pm tonight   there is a store in west Toronto

all my changes were there   colourful windows behind the stars   yellow

citymoon  on the rise

fabrics more voluminous now  as oldbroads age  (hey i’m from the 50’s)

3/4 sleeves  dropwaists  husband’s falling like flies  now begins the time

of existing without our slain heroes   all our friends are dead   said Pete

   (now quite arthritic…go know!)

42 years of froufrou  these daze  denizens deshabille  +flirty  as we enter a

time of liminality  the Reap winks  we herd in for the grande finale  don’t be

bitter  old holyfool   just lie back  +be proud you wore Canadian  eh

__

Fall 2025  ..(not so) poetic vitreous detachment on the walk home..

oh bartleby oh humanity