‘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.