And today my one strife is emblazoning incisions in a tome
For an open-heart surgery. And today I beat against – beat my body to a pulp –
Stone archways and doorways all through an imaginary Rhine divested of
Character. The phrase “I’m poor” wringing my inner-ear like cat candy.
Today I feel – how worthless –“I feel” “I feel;” These are completely words
I churn into a somnolent machine who refuses to transmit joy,
And cracking the code means putting your head in an oven. What?
Category: Short Nameless Reveries
Small but powerful thoughts and tidbits of feeling. Mostly unedited and “raw,” faintly sentimental, resentful and other strong-and-fast states of being. Things one might scrawl out on the back of an exam or a napkin, meant to be reflected upon for exactly what they are and nothing more.
The dead fox in the pickup slumped like linens was a testament to the untouchable cold. I’m in this heated bus and it frightened me. Stunned, shocked, confronted. I couldn’t make myself know the Fox couldn’t feel cold. It looked like a younger brother or a writer of an autobiography filled to the hard spine with colors and scents.
My father’s turn for Sundayschool unearthed
In tender minds the same way as a newborn
Full-breath, how fear could molt a ripened fruit
for squeezing like a heart to taint to taste to rule
And juice, mingled with the old pages splayed
My father’s gospel was beating drums.
To scare the devil with hot fruit fire and
His phobias, with stone bodies flexed
And I did, I smelled citrus in the cemetery.
Strung like beads of light amidst the graves
We did not wake the rocks with laughter
They’d think our feet were thunder.
I am here I am back in NYC again.
I woke this day to the release of bus exhaust
and toddler cries, amazed that I slept, batted
a beam of squeezed city sun from my eye and sat up.
It’s time I was a reliable conductor of
these cascading passengers named each
different types of anxieties one by one
by one thousand if the train leaves the
station too early or uptown rather
than down leaving the cavity
of my wordless mouth in its place
before I can step onto the platform
the brainpan vacated like-
Until you’ve slept on river rocks alone
Or worn a dying shroud of ants like lace
You’ve loosed your cold water skin from the bone
Clutched your self closed curled down, chanting grace
To the ancestors in your wounds who drink
The screams of nations for their strength, wipe the
Red from your mouth like a honeybee, gorged
On the ember of the salt and burn.
But a flick,
And their drums clamoring up,
Ashes to ancestry
Descendants to dust.
Ana Celeste Poetry 