Jeannine Hall Gailey: RESCUING SEIRYU, THE BLUE DRAGON

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You met the dragon in the garden. Sometimes he flies in circles outside your window. This morning he appeared as a young boy. He shows you a vision of your parents, lying in a barn. With his face so close you smell hay.

He bleeds from the wounds of paper birds, from a swallowed curse. Can your healing rice cake keep him from death? You hold his head in your arms as he squirms red, you force his jaws open and touch his teeth. When you feed him he gags and chokes, changing from human to dragon and back, his eyes always blue.

The dragon is really the river of your childhood home. He hands you a pink tennis shoe you lost in the water when you were seven. That river was drained years ago for development.

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Since then the dragon
has no home but you, no name
but your memory.

.by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Port Townsend, Washington

first published in The Eleventh Muse, 2007

Jeannine Hall Gailey: LOVE STORY (WITH FIRE DEMON AND TENGU)

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Maybe in this version you are a bird, and I have become an old woman. Maybe you ate a falling star. It’s hard to love someone in a castle – they always feel distant. I will open a flower shop and learn to speak German, take to wearing ruffled dresses and straw hats. You'd like to pin me down, but you could tell my feet weren't touching the ground. I called your name over and over, but you couldn't hear me above the din of the bombers. It was like movies of wartime Japan. I looked up and there were planes bulging with smoke.

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The blue sky kept getting darker –
sometimes, I thought,
with your shadow.

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In the end, I have a dog in my arms and a scarecrow for a friend, but I never make it to Kansas. The field is wet and stormy, I kiss three men goodnight for their magic. The door to your childhood is opening for me. It allows me passage into a brick wall, my fists full of shiny black feathers, the shell of an egg, the howl of cold wind against a mountain. Don't worry, your heart is in good hands. Let me keep it a little longer; its blue glow illuminates everything.

by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Port Townsend, Washington

first published in Cranky, Spring 2007