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THYLIAS MOSS

https://thyliasmoss-writer.com

Thylias Moss is a multiracial maker of poems, in any form necessary with fourteen books in print. "Although many of Moss’s poems discuss race and gender, explains scholar Langdon Hammer, “her poetry makes such facts of identity seem unfamiliar, their meanings not to be predicted, unavailable to the naked eye.” In fact, Moss’ paternal grandfather was an immigrant from India and half-Caucasian, her father half Native American, and her mother Black; and she has never felt a need to define herself by race. Her work in the 2018-2019 Winter Edition of PoetryMagazine.com is a selection of upcoming poems in her new collection: Shawsheen Memorial Broom Society. Moss is sixty-four years old and in love for the first time in her life with another poet, frequently her collaborator, Mr. Bob Holman, age seventy. Close friends for thirty years, much closer since her divorce in 2013, she often does not know for sure just which one of them wrote which line, but that does not matter at all. He is her thing and she is his thing after so many years of knowing each other. In the photo, she wears his hat. The recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, this is Thylias Moss’ favorite collection of poems because they are about him or are collaborations with him.

Thylias Moss reading
“Blue Coming,”
a Pushcart Prize-winning poem

(Sometimes even the dreariness of being here

Seems luminous)
SHAWSHEEN PERCEPTION- INFINITY

This parking lot has no right to seem so

Deceptively bright as if

No suffering, no panic (DJ) anywhere in any world

That also contains

Though hardly my pleasure

Repo Harmony

An attempt to take back what

Has been given honestly

Thunderbolt raffles “rafflesia”

Anxiety

Java, Java, Java man made bouquets of rotting flesh

Hardly real man only

Controversy ever proven

Instinks born in the flower a pot of stinking

Flesh, five petals corresponding roughly

To five senses of people, these would have easily

Repelled Goldilocks “Rafflesia arnoldii” 39 inches of

Odiferous pleasure traps, harpoons of

Stank aromas

3, 4 shut the doors “little shop of horrors”

Growth spurt before anyone swallows liverwurst

And the whale—bowfin skewed out of whack

Regurgitates foul disciple on Shawsheen Shores overrun

With flies and their amazing compound eyes on

Official state flower of Indonesia, oh what beautiful offal, so

So so many names for my feelings flesh of “Rafflesia” served

By the precious ounce, corpse flower, bouquet

For corpse bride

I always liked idea of butter flying, what I saw

Beyond mere cyclone, in 1939 wizard of Oz’ed

Feelings:

Butter in churns inverted cyclones themselves

Taking off like rockets

Even Dorothy didn’t notice “rafflesia”

In the garden where she slept inside such flowers

Over so many rainbows cut up (by butterfly pollination)

Halloween candy possibilities

all of them owing something

To “rafflesia”

And raffles

On this day so sunny I have to think of

Rainbows I experience only in your

Army of arms

not a single flower

Manages to grow on this property that deters

And condemns growth, only what flourishes in asphalt

Still fresh, almost sticky as mucus had to be before a slue

Of failed inseminations in which I was a corpse bride, truly,

in marriage, till death do us part, I was killed by

Lack of fulfillment in marriage; indeed,

beauty never clanged there; I

have no “Thing”

but the “Thing” itself

and the breath, the air that

brushes your wrinkles, thoroughly tongued

awakenings of flying jazzy Things:

cyclones and pastry bags

27th Birthday Nemo Shawsheen Song

Nemo with his glass window eye, even

More compelling than Peter Falk’s right one, glassy

As tonic cavorting in glassy gin and tonic rink

Missing nothing, all the way from Michigan

To Ansted, West Virginia,

West

where suns and sons set preparing to Rise come

Morning’s

glass eye

Explosions

into prisms, each prism seeing

What light is made of, so many

Dizzying colors, all of them in instruments

Of scientists at the heart of geological musics

Bituminous coal singing loudly, your fiesta of

Engines hard to beat up Gauley Mountain

You posing on New River Gorge Bridge, you

already ascending, clouds touching you becoming

Wings when

your prisms capture every sunset

Colors dream up, for you are Orange Ambition

And Culmination, source of sunset on that bridge

Elevator to compact heaven

Streaking through your doors,

even driver

Impressed by views only possible with you.

Shawsheen Blue Singularity Coming

Clouds have formed a ring around

A hole in the sky.

Blue hole in the sky will soon become a poem

Or something similar as color collects in Singularity,

My blue-eyed Thing, dual blue sockets

Your eyes, black sockets when Blue possibilities

Are screwed in, some pain, as everything gathers

—singular river— crinkled to take up

less space, fold

And even more fits, what hangs out, just

trim off, slash with sonic screwdriver as these

become more popular in

Incredible gravitational attraction, so tight and fast, no

Particles or electromagnetic radiation escapes,

hundreds of lassos pull you into

my event horizons, slight bruising

Accounts for Blue as true as your eyes, same spectrum,

“Drum Roll please”:

as you squeeze me as an ideal blackbody curved

In this rodeo riding space time with you,

your Logan sapphire eyes:

Temperature billionths of a

Kelvin of our prayerful stellar mass,

we are another

Perfect leg of Pisces constellation

hot for conflagration of

This Love you shy away from

at times

your light caught here, probably forever

To shine it will have to flow wavily through me, effort

accumulates, smoke-smiles

In our burning stellar mass, impossible

to observe, “US”-ness

Beyond the merely theoretical, surrounded

by brightness, unbelievable intensity

Just from a first deep kiss deeply embedded

in the “no-space”between us,

Nothing “nano” here!

Not even escape velocity, this black hole rotates

and as it circles on

a lathe of sky, swallows

even rainbows in that region, becoming speckled here

and there with gold flakes in your eyes, Golden sparks livening

up your blueskied eyes,

Driver especial, “we romp and roll

And sweat” —oh that unlikely heat: the two of us:

Our Own Sing (u back and forth to me & you) in which

Somehow you are still able to see “US-ness” tingling and tonguing

the way teens do with nothing on us, you

entering your Blue, cool seventies,

and entering me, colorful comet

Knitting needle and scholastic pointer, fixing

your attention on me,

New “Giggly Childe” Lifetime Constellation

just couple of light years, the time it takes

your gaze to travel all of me until I want you to take the lead

and I will follow super- and subra-

Sonically, Looking the way you love for me to look when I am

looking at you and Loving what I see more and more-same

as what happens when you take the lead as no one else

Ever can, you evrso present and surrounding me, that

whispered ring of clouds, tickles and Shawsheened Springs

of your wonderful scratchy beard and mustache that cause orgasms

just from Kissing you, and the way the hairs feel on my tongue as

I really am the Big Mama instantly, dual

Personality as you take me hard

yet I want you to take me even harder in this singularity,

Over and in and under and through me as I desire both of us taking cues:

Time for as much Forever remains for “Us-ness” to claim

The Shawsheen Password is Ecru Nemo

To you: here’s your colon screening screaming:

Raw ecru thoughts abolishing sense and census

While I am in the quirks and bad poetry

Quick Sand

And little lambs eat ivy covered towering over

Delinquent judgments unbleached, out

Of reach, grease, and Clabber accoutrements

And realizing that:

I may as well be both throwing and

dodging sharpened

stainless steel knives, as

This circus might just be here to

stay, pinned

to all those

Colorful wheels to add flavored flair to

those aluminum Xmas trees

Longing to be burnt baby brunettes

And dreams. Sweet of course.

Sung by and with the Wichita Lineman, who is still on the line

In the glen, narrow secluded valley where

I too need a small vacation, preferably with you, for

I do need you, maybe more than want you though

I don’t see how that is possible:

“want” and “need” keep trading places, and both

are excellent, and walkways to re-fine-Eries —though

there is no way to make you better, finer, maybe on

that small vacation where I can hear your voice again

unless it is programmed to speak only the gibberish that

I am somehow interfering with and complicating your life

when seems to me that Love is required for all time. Even

mine for you.

Seems that it is advent now of morning, must be

since I am practically mourning a loss

trying

to slip through my hands

gold flecked sand of you

after making contact in Wichita aircraft production hub, that

“Air Capital of the World”

but not without you in it, my propeller head spinning

inhabited since 3000 BC, solving the mystery date mystery

codex trunk of a tree,

and we all know “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” or thereabouts:

Tree trunk source of propellor blades, a bouquet of surf boards

and I am your gidget again, for all time,

this time thanks to Wichita Kisses type b and that

revolving “B” line of active propellers connecting us

with the venue that is not hollow but is full

Of heart-felt poe-Trees lining banks of Shawsheen River gold

flecks of you keeping the banks solvent, both of them, and

that watery road between them, icy in solitudes like winter

winners and then Nemo skates on strength of

pure memories

fortified with you. Always. No better advantage

than having you and Nemo’s engine chirping forever lucky

fiesta Shawsheen River barge

puffing orange blooming bouquets kissing misty air craft landing

Here and here.

All poems are Copyright ©Thylias Moss from Shawsheen Memorial Broom Society