Carol Muske-Dukes: California Poets Part 10, Four Poems

Carol Muske-Dukes

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Carol Muske-Dukes

Four Poems

(Bad) Scheherazade

The sultan who topped off

So many one night stands

Was stunned when the moon

Became sun & still no end.

Fire dream gone cold since

Longing takes its final form

Of impatience. Her story’s drifting

Seems to imply what the candles

Pout at in twists of flame: stasis

In the shaving mirror set before him

Each morning. That face demands flattery.

Each night dies as last rites for the bride.

Till she is the one and only ongoing

End to a thousand stories & he is idiot

Audience to What Comes Next.

Trouble

Scheherazade kept the story

Running till dawn, when it

Stopped, dropped off –

So she stayed alive,

Rubbing herself like a lamp.

Like a genie disrupted, mid-wish.

If all stories are like a race, I am

A woman getting a little

Ahead of  it – her wish free

Life’s path to bad trouble.                                                                                               

Everywhere were judges

Backing a court’s crime. 

Twisted shrink who signed

Off on rape pardon. A soul is not

Shatterproof. Says the storyteller

Who calls out the preacher’s sermon:  

Only some of us deserve to be saved. Story

Begun in the freaky garden. The fast curve Daphne

 Rounds, before her body as a tree, is shut.

 Our only heaven’s the dying earth and its story –

 Daughter Exile, Angry Mother, the Sky’s Gracious Slut.

Third Person

Bullied kid, short-sighted from

Reading late. Back when she

Believed what the veiled hierarchies

Passed down. Like the triangle, its

Off-side glow known as the Holy Ghost.

Set aside like any female, solo.

Unlike the other two: big on action.

She was no see-through cumulus, no

Spotlit Virgin’s tiara of stars. Think of

God high as an ascending kite then

Stopped, dropped into tongues of

Fire above bowed heads. A lightning

Strike sufficient to lift Saul off his

Mount halfway to Damascus. Still

She sat down to write at last

About the snow piled high on her

Way to dawn Mass. Or how she

Lost interest in Daddy King

Hurling threats or the Son adored

As perfect agony in stained glass.

The fire-bird from the first had been

Winged and wise Sophia, birthing herself

In the void that Two on their own fall into:

Marriage, patrimony, a mirror’s panoply.

Imagine her alone, ghost after ghost: a poem.

(Previously published in the REVEL)

Saxifrage

“Saxifrage is my flower that splits/the rocks.” – W.C.W.

A lit cigarette, held at wrist height

Like a prom corsage, brushes her pulse.

Years later, something in her

Stirring like a fissure deep in

Rock. To step out of a sealed

Geode into shattered speech:

Half memory, half mirror, smashed.

Author Bio:

Carol Muske-Dukes officially retired from USC after over thirty years as a full professor with tenure and solo founder of the PhD program in Creative Writing/literature. Besides her many years at USC, she has taught at Columbia’s MFA program, Iowa’s Writers Workshop, the MFA Program at UC Irvine, University of Virginia, and George Washington University as a Jenny McKean Moore Lecturer. She has published 16 books, poems, novels and essay collections, along with co-editing anthologies. Her collection BLUE ROSE was long-listed as a Pulitzer prize finalist in 2019.