You are beyond intrigue, luminescent when you fill a room.
I adore the flip of your feathery hair, the chestnut glow, your essence
I am filled with light and softness
Your laugh is the very meaning of joy.
I appreciate your nose. Your jaw, your shape, the way you light up and crinkle under your own smile, shyly, boldly, blushing.
Tag: nostalgia
Try writing about pain.
Never rests on the skin it is
Within inside, the depths, always,
the down the browbeaten city by city
Tar-black for miles open wounded rubble
Un-glowed organs sticking under bridges
Reverse emanation, the dusty heat and exhaust
A filthy wilted wrist like a child’s and
Is brown. Is brown like a sinking ship
The splintered wood like incense
Brown and thusly dim
Scrub it raw til it—
So many things are like,
Something that doesn’t
Exist in language.
Each photograph mother stark with specific eyes.
Ghostly bright in search, tearing fear
Fearing find or a fresh fruit-crisp birth next
Formula tubes too formulated to rot second chances,
Third chance, a headdress of food stamps,
Pa’lante.
You my ever looming father sleeveless
battered body leant to a small cat.
You emanated into her
your stored, storm, clearwater countenance boiling
Out into not saying everything ever and you cupped,
Vowing your rough palms,
Your hands around a final marigold when
You shielded it
From sun.
You struck the rock, prophet
with a shovel until
yellow cryptograms strewn out
rose in the breeze relieved the
rustling of bible leaves on your neck.
Broke your voice for us like
a pomegranate offered me a seed
with pain in your face I liked
to stare at and searching
my head frantic, your eyes were a little boy
some treasure always spread encrusted
under the first layer of earth
handed us linens and grandmother quilts
to cover over ground. You ached
for a death
we’d need to stir the dirt
a stir perhaps pull out a waif
in your old clothes. people-
clients told me despite it all
I looked like the soul
of my father. A sacred pause
in me each instance. That night
I stirred through my head words
to find a gentle lure for your ghost
without you even knowing.
You had a secret name fermenting
Under my tongue. I smiled and
It went yellow in my mouth.
A budding unseen burial
Ring shinnied silver tones
In my bone where you were
This is what you do in
Tiny doses. My medication
Never beamed old history lights
Or pinstripe lights your fingertips
Through a womb of dust
Stirred a new pigment.
The black broth, the cream fissures
in particle trails like living sprites
foam in swirls to the crust of my goblet
in plumes of white steam, bellowing
and bathing my skin in ink
giving me breath and old ideas
this liquid flushes our bodies of impurities
while we sit in the thick, sticky dark
of twilight June.
We both have work today.
Ana Celeste Poetry 