New Age Cassandra by Scott Owens

Our mad sister is
standing on street corners
handing out poetry
and political leaflets,
painting her skin,
dressing like death,
crying out raptures
of doom, sleeping
with owls and stray
dogs, burning
candles and incense,
dancing under moonlight,
circling the fires,
reaching into water,
reading the leaves,
hoarding books
and bones, scraps
of dead things
talking with mountains,
birds, trees,
streams, stars,
the moon, feeling
their words in her body,
perched on the edge
of her lips, speaking
the names of those
who came before her:
Mary and Joan,
Sappho and Atropos,
Catherine and Susan,
Harriett and Rosa,
counting the corpses
floating downstream,
planting seeds
of hope, trying
to save us from ourselves
and taking the blame
for everything.
She is listening
to voices, speaking
in tongues, hanging out
on the shores of things,
porches and borders,
dawns and dusks,
where nothing is quite
one or the other
but something in between.

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