Jeannine Hall Gailey
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Introduction in Indigo Children (After a Consult with a Medical Intuitive)
for K.A. Agodon
You kept making posters of women with
rose petals across their eyelids, then went blind.
I consulted a medical psychic who told me
I was an indigo child, great with promise, that
a star entered my body at birth. A blue-cloaked
Virgin Mary whirls above me in the air
like a dancing queen. Like Nelson Mandela and
Jeanne d’Arc, I should expect grand work and grand suffering.
Indigo children, like Ragdoll kittens, may or may not be
part alien, with independent natures and high IQs.
We usher in the Age of Aquarius and here all I can picture
is the musical “Hair,” you with daisies over your eyes
and around your blond locks a halo and me glowing blue
in the dark, letting the sunshine in. Never mind my little brother
is the actual Aquarian, typically diffident, not at all
the whirling dervish. We decide the spinning Mary characters are better
than angels with flaming swords, an icon of music and celebration,
and hope I can, unlike Mandela and poor Jeanne, avoid prison.
We pray for epiphany, a star to light the way and stumble,
unmindful, on a path twisted, littered with mystic trouble.
The End of the Future
Looks bleaker than we thought. The end is near, all those signs.
The clouds outside my house curl like an evil magician’s beard.
The children’s books are full of futuristic dystopias. Clones, slaves,
hunger games, post-nuclear mutants, zombies. It’s not a safe era,
they’ve been taught to fear everything – salmonella in the peanut butter,
allergens in the air, the creepy guy next door who, let’s face it, probably
is a pervert. They know better than to say “yes” to adults.
So let’s leave it to them to survive whatever rapture or apocalypse
lies before them. Let us accumulate for them: potato chips, underwear,
stories that were written before paper, eyeglasses and antibiotics.
A narrative of how things used to be. An imagined world without wars
or time paradoxes or plagues, where they could camp out all night and watch fireflies
before the green glow came to represent something far more sinister.
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Jeannine Hall Gailey recently served as Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006), She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011) and Unexplained Fevers, recently published from New Binary Press in Ireland. Her work was featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and American Poetry Review. She volunteers for Crab Creek Review and is a 2013 Jack Straw Writer.