‘A Bust of Bernie Taupin’, ‘Effigies’ & ‘Movie Love’
Jill E. T. Bemis is an aspiring photographer, landscape painter, and writer. Her photography may be viewed at https://jetbemis.com. A career public servant, she lives in Minnesota with her husband Michael, son Nate, daughter-in-law Julia, and Tiger the cat.
A Bust of Bernie Taupin
Hail beats down on the secret
service.
Hail beats down on the vice
president,
his hateful rhetoric,
his cotton brief,
his weird side of beef . . .
It takes a while,
but our concerns return to music.
We have our own agenda
to discuss and a bust of Bernie
Taupin to unveil.
It takes a while to separate
the pellets of ice
from the feathers and fragile
bones a snake
vomits as he passes through,
the song a bird sang
from the song his descendants
are singing.
Effigies
People can be made from twigs and rope. We call these people “effigies.” These people are born for ritual, beautiful and strange. Moving with the grace of a summer storm or Greek goddess, allowing one eye to widen slightly, they save the world again and again. They let us watch as they make love, and we destroy them.
I have a reoccurring dream that I am playing Percy Shelley, that I am on stage interacting with Lord Byron having never learned my lines. Somehow, what needs to get said, gets said. Improvised. Believed. During the afterparty, someone steals my car.
Movie Love
The working title of her novel
is The Evolution of Movie Love.
She may change it to Eyes Are Never
Private or Eyes Are Disobedient
Children. She may change her own name
or hide it behind enormous initials.
A master of revealing something
other than what she reveals, she sticks out
her tongue. Rolls her eyes. I rice a giant
cauliflower and add green curry paste
to organic coconut cream. She says
no actor alive could play us in the film
adaptation and dreams of resurrecting
the late Meena Kumari and Burl Ives.
Glen Armstrong (he/him) holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters. His poems have appeared in Conduit, Poetry Northwest, and Another Chicago Magazine.
