Blood and Milk

I dreamed of Oxford . . .
          (spires, a thousand spires, endless lectures, musty halls
          a solitary self in a Bodleian expanse
          A good life my dear Wormwood. An orderly life.)

then awakened to laundry
          and things to be wiped
          (countertops, noses, bottoms)

How did this happen? And when, exactly?

Time flows, it flows, it flows
and there are choices to be made:

          left or right?
          paper or plastic?

          blood or milk?

There’s freedom in the bleeding;
bondage in the milk
Do not be deceived.

Ah, but it’s an empty freedom;
A holy bondage,
A sweet and holy bondage.

Five times I chose the chains, those tender chains,
          (though once will bind you just as well!)
and checked the crimson flow.
Suckled while dreaming of Trinity Term
but awakened, always awakened, to the laundry
and to that small and cherished captor at my breast.

          –Sharlee Mullins Glenn

Mimesis Upended: A Reluctant Nod to Mr. Wilde

How did she see peaches,
never seeing a Cezanne?
This mother of my mother
who passed to me, across a generation,
her own deep-burning need for Beauty.

Or so I’m told.
“You remind me of your grandma,”
my mother used to chide as she coaxed me
from pages abloom with Renoirs and Monets.
“Only she loved honeysuckle and Indian paintbrush.”

I don’t remember.
I knew her only when she was old
and her mind was gone
and she waltzed with strangers in her ruby robe
and sang, “Have you seen my new shoes?”

How did she see flowers,
knowing no O’Keefe to lead her
deep into the sultry depths of poppies?
This daughter of desert basin who journeyed once
as far as Blue Bench–one day’s ride.

“You’ve got your grandma’s eyes,” great-aunts
peer out through watery lenses and decide.
But I know better.
She saw unaided (unencumbered)
She saw direct, all by herself.
I can’t.

How would I see orange without Albers,
thick-crusted bread without Vermeer,
eyes without Eakins, light without Turner,
my own still bath-wet form reflected
without hosts from Phidias forward?

Proud fashioners of Art (of life?)
These benefactor-thieves,
bestowing their vision while robbing my own,
granting me what grandma never had–
the prejudice of education.

          –Sharlee Mullins Glenn

Raison d’etre

They say the closest
distance
between two
points
is a straight line

But tell me–
in real life
does anything
(save the hypothetical crow)
travel straight?

water ripples
light undulates
sound moves in waves

Perhaps experience too
is best transmitted
not straight on
but through a twist,
a loop, a spiral

Such convolution,
some think,
is called for,
makes more sense;
hence,

Poetry.

          –Sharlee Mullins Glenn

Sharlee has a master’s degree from BYU and taught there for a number of years before giving up academia for the writing life. She has published essays, short stories, and poetry in journals as varied as Women’s Studies, The Southern Literary Journal, BYU Studies, and The Restored Gospel and Applied Christianity. She is also the author of several books and numerous magazine stories for children. Sharlee lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah with her husband, James, and their five children.