Three Poems, Sherese Francis

 Saint Veronica (Naming Ceremony Part II)
(Inspired by my grandmother and Belkis Ayon’s Vernicle series)

My grandmother’s name was Veronique.
She bestowed her name unto me as my middle name.
The name I would share with the shed blood of relation.
The name given to me :: medium. :: mirror. :: mask.
The name carries the past 
I could never witness with my own eyes.
The name always returns :: a face.

The face returns :: the first iconography.
The face returns :: the measure of the weight of light shining through punctured skin.
The face returns :: sweat. soot. s/ang/uine stain.
The face returns :: a death mask.
The face returns :: these watery reflections of love. or is it con/demnation? or is it vic/tory?
The face returns :: you the screen-struck girl.
The face returns :: the propelling of a fabrication.
The face returns :: an uncredited picture. a disembodied source.
The face returns :: a bacchanal dismemberment leaving the head as oracle.
The face returns :: a brazen head rolling down the river. 
The face returns :: a beheading in crosshairs.
The face returns :: a Medusian talking bronze horse. a Wizard’s green mask. a Mimir.
The face returns :: I believe I know I love you and not much beyond that.
The face returns :: an unidentified flying creature forged on an aegis.
The face returns :: these forget me nots.
The face returns :: the horror of seeing his missing face.
The face returns :: the other holding up the mask of his missing face.
The face returns :: the other seeing through his eye sockets.
The face returns :: a snake egg.
The face returns :: a wounded projection.
The face returns :: a slow motion smack in the face.
The face returns :: a sun-incarnated fleece.
The face returns :: a caul vision.
The face returns :: a new craft on in/visibility
The face returns :: the eye at the center of spinning wool. 
The face returns :: a crossdresser’s manifesto.
The face returns :: a bullfighter’s mockery. Or a thread out of the labyrinth. 
The face returns :: a look into the cavern’s pool to see your grandmother’s face again.

Dis face covers up :: a form of Re/velation.
A weaver of the face :: a flag clearing space in a name :: the foundation of a Re/volution.
The trick of the constant doing and undoing:
She wears the songs of Caly/pso to forget apo/caly/pse. She’s dancing an in/visible dance.
Dis face re/mem/bers herself on your body as if Nature will never tear the body apart.

Battle of the Quiet, Contemplative Oracle

Them: You’re so quiet!

Me: You have to earn access.

Them: Why are you so quiet?!

Me: Demanding my words is breaking and entering.

Them: Why are you so quiet?

Me: Would you like step on the shattered window glass in my mouth?

Them: Say something!

Me: I have two ears with an open sign and dry lips stuck together. (G)Listen.

Them: Talk!

Me: Moving my Jaw requires anointing. Pass some oil to me.

Them: Speak up!

Me: My vocal cords haven’t been to the gym. I’m working on a mem/ber/ship in nakedness.

Them: Why?

Me: Words require labor. Are usually birthed with heavy messiahs covering their bodies.

Them: Why?

Me: Tongue twisters. My tongue gets cramps.

Them: Quiet?!

Me: Mistranslations of the mind               Dis/figuring both of us.

Them: Quiet?!

Me: Di/vine existed before saying a word.

Them: Quiet?!

Me: My arm is a long tongue. A dancer. A drapetomaniac. A w/riter of ringshouts. A cursive language speaker. 

Them: Quiet?

Me: Some sounds can’t be heard by human ears.

Them:

Me: Is my tongue part of your colony? Your manifest destiny? Do you feel less real without it?

Them:

Me: The tele/phone — ultimate symbol of modern man’s inability to communicate. Binding and carrying as man/y sounds we can. Still understanding is too far. Rings at the wrong time. Distracts the mind from its concentration. I am misheard all the time. You slur my speech with an accent. Like a baby learning to sing.

Them:

Me: Too much wind around a ship steered by a trying ty/rant sinks it: A why?-whale chase fixation in response to dis/mem/ber/ment. A limping king of thieves curious about origins, the answers to herself, the product of civilized brutality. A blurting out of a one-leg’s secret name when thinking the spinner isn’t (k)listening, and having to flee in a lady’s body. Are you still (k)listening?

Theory of My Minds: I Having a Conversation with Myself Having a Conversation with Des/Cartes Having a Conversation with Himself (Meditations with Enlightenment and Freedom)

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.” — Audre Lorde

Dear Re/NTR,

Who is God in the eye of the beholder?

I can never catch myself in a flowing river. Ground zero is where new paths of unmapped territory are found.

Is there a God? If so, does God deceive?

You need a lot of make-up remover.

What is intimacy?

What I think of you will die. What I think of myself will die. Hint: the Self dies all the time. 

Define the ripple effect.

It is yourself always broken open and read.

What is the correlation between the depth of Self and the depth of Image?

Self-preservation can be the same as Self-ignor/ance. Aka what sank the titan(ic).

Deluge or delusion?

Definition: Tumbling around in a deep whirlpool. I have fallen and I’m not sure I want to get out.

Who is the father of science, psychology, philosophy?

Your thoughts are not my thoughts. Classification and authority: a fabrication of certainty. The wise say they love their mother and her big pot.

Is there one immovable point to shift the earth?

I have a distorted sense of the world. You pushed me off balance. It is my form of adaptation. 

Do memories lie?

My body. My shape. My place. My movement. My extended self is a chimera. Call it compounded matter aka it’s complicated.

Is this life a dream?

As long as I conceive of the idea that nothing has happened, it has. The consequences of construction. Even fiction has its own rules.

Then distinguish reality from fantasy.

I overthink others’ reactions to me. How do you know that’s me? Sorry, my mind is prone to err…

What is thought? What is rationality? What is man? What is animal? 

Self-movement is a question of relationships and reflections. Pull my string. Or is it my leash? 

Then what is intellect?

A tower of babel. or babble. Oh I got it: experimentation of the experience of environment and embodiment. How about this: the e-motional limit as it approaches words and equipment. 

Do you mind that I put us at risk by reading beneath the surface? 

I’m gathering evidence.

When something changes is it still itself?

What do you think I am? I’d like to remember myself as I was. I mean am. I mean will be. I mean what I am not. You know what I mean. 

Is God a He? Does God look like me?

If so, then I don’t exist.

Is seeing believing?

Only with selective attention. I’m over here. 

Am I somebody or just deceived?

I can only make judgements about things that are known to me and things I am still unaware: I am a thinking thing. I in a stable. Neigh. 

Is I dependent on what I invent?

What use is imagination if I can’t cover myself up. I am missing a puzzle piece. What’s the big picture?

I think I am, so I exist?

Please tell me that I matter. I heard in the dark outer space, you are weightless because no external force of contact is there to hold you. I wish I could fall for you.

What is the nature of the human mind?

My body is angry that you don’t listen to it. 

Signed

Re/TRN

Sherese Francis is an Alkymist of the I-Magination and expresses her(e)self through poetry, interdisciplinary arts, workshop facilitation, editing and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Some of her(e) work has been published in Furious Flower, Obsidian, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, and Newtown Literary. Additionally, Sherese has published three chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant), Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature), and Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press).

MANIFESTING MARTYRDOM, Estajoka

 
Now look to the Western Wall and mourn

Now mourn your warm rejection
Adjacent Golgotha

Break bread with the ancients 
In self-imposed exile

On the all-hallows eve of the election year crisis
Make reign ballistic strength of self-sabotage

And sacrifice more followers in the name of
Another forsaken false prophet

And you’ve sacrificed common fucking sense and fracking logic

Because across the left of your position pond
Novus Ordum Seclorum 
And Ingsoc are losing profits

…highly unacceptable in the social decorum of concomitant capitalistic endeavors…

Fracking un-fucking-believible
God damn near impossible 

Short of prayer to launch a kinet
ic campaign
Crossing oceans
Crossing continents with asymmetric sticks and stones

Define the metric
Criterion for Success
And you’ve established the entire State of Gaza
As just another suicide vest…

Estajoka is a Revolutionary Bum of the Generation GWOT. Raised on GI Joe, He-Man, and corn syrup, Estajoka’s primary source of cognitive dissonance stems from the uncertainty concerning his true identity as a Generation X or a Millennial. In his 20’s Estajoka cut teeth in the industry or war as an executor of shit Boomer policies, in peacekeeping, combat, and humanitarian operations. In return, he was forced to sacrifice a life of peace, to endure the harsh realities, largely isolated to Warfighters, Veterans, and their loved ones. His goal in bringing these works to light is to increase the volume of the silent majority whose stories need to be told.

ALIGNMENT PROCESS, Will Davis

 

There is a time lapse of my eyes
Where I slept in perhaps—
An event like stalagmites
burgeoning at seams that was
In a dark that eats voices.
 
There was that was,
a drowsy calculus that only allows
a slip of tongue or lavender,
a rustle of a blanket, remnants
of scent-smears like deodorant.
 
Rustle of blanket, remains of body
warmth , I thought assassins had arrived
for every bird and creaking branch, unless
silence is a new growth, growling
gently along the elevated limbs.
 
All that light, winding its way
against the final body I have
Grown silent watching at the leisurely
pacings of my heart against doors.

Will (he/they) is a nurse, poem scribbler and solitaire enthusiast living in their native bluegrass. Author of chapbook Starter Pistol, Opening Prayer with Alien Buddha Press. @ByThisWillAlone across platforms.

Two Poems, Adam Cornford

 Psalm of The Flower

The flower grown to to its full height wears a mountain like a lethal skirt

The flower enters dark doorways trembling and spilling beaks of moonlight

The flower drifts through enormous abandoned houses pursued by little girls

The flower hides within rings of mirrors until reflected sunlight turns it into a dragon

The flower seldom walks without a system to follow as it pollinates the maps

What savage agent enables the flower to roll like a wheel through the forest?

Traffic: A Sonnet

Cloud ocean surrounding a slow swirl of cities
Sunlight reaches below the clouds to brush my eyelids
Staircases rise and fall, pistons in a house machine
Tiny wooden shutters open and close inside the heart
Green bees argue surrounding the brain of lavender
About the rococo flowering of the fingers in air
And the machinery of dragonflies and clover
A shell-river of yellow taxis advances to fill all space
Women in red face to face press their palms together
As hollow windows echo each other in the sunset
Whatever am I doing here at the Swan Exchange?
Doors slam open into more doors faster and faster
Marching across the shiny mosaic moonrise
Silence is its own train pulling into the terminus

Adam Cornford, born in England, was Chair of the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco 1987-2008. He has published 4 full-length poetry collections, most recently LALIA (Chax Press 2021) as well as a book-length collaboration with the printer and book artist Peter Koch, LIBER IGNIS (2014) and numerous chapbooks. Often described as a neosurrealist and known as a poet of science and science fiction, he is currently at work on METROPOLYTA, a long narrative poem (or novel in verse) built out of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent science-fiction masterpiece METROPOLIS. The poem's protagonist is the MaschinenMensch or gynoid robot who plays a central role in the film.

Urban Punks in Cahokia, Mitchell Pluto

Putting butter in your coffee has its limits.

I bid adieu to my B vitamin steak. I will miss you.

Picture a world without milk.

Ice cream melting rapidly, just like time.

Urban punks in Cahokia, rocking our Superphones.

You know how important we are with screens and phones.

Those epic malls and convenient centers of Valhalla uploaded to the Grand Central Terminal internet.

Brace yourself for Temu. It’s got it all. Soon it will be too much.

Wars of value, relevance, and delivering discarded items.

All this didn’t last as long as the Milky way.

The soil’s health is not being discussed on Facebook Reels.

Just like space explorers, microplastics are on a mission through the vastness of our environment.

When you think about it, everyone is basically a hibakusha.

Every brain harbors scenarios that resemble Katsushika Hokusai’s, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.

A fantasy that fearlessly blurs the lines of reality without consent or limits.

Reality endured a ruthless assault, as if every influencer was squeezing, biting, and sucking it dry.

I always mix up the economy and the stock market like it’s a cocktail shaker.

As of now, it’s not a historical drama that you can binge-watch on a streaming platform.

The Roman Empire comes beautifully close, if you’re interested. Yes, beautifully like bigly.

Mississippians and the Buzzard Cult were hip to the limited series.

I’m pretty sure Edgar Cayce was talking about a computer when he said the word crystal. But I’m still not sure.

It was like time was playing tricks on us, with the present and past all jumbled together.

The memories undergo slight alterations as we recall them.

While amnesia happens a lot, some folks say they can remember past lives at Göbekli Tepe.

A flowing line between garbage and newness. Art with a bold line that separates primate from the software enhancer.

There's this commercial that keeps popping up on my screen about immortality.

I'm thinking about moving my memory to a younger clone. This trend is really catching on.

Don’t stress, actual stars shine brighter than any confinement.

Putting butter in your coffee has its limits.

I bid adieu to my B vitamin steak. I will miss you.

Picture a world without milk.

Ice cream melting rapidly, just like time.

Urban punks in Cahokia, rocking our Superphones.

You know how important we are with screens and phones.

Those epic malls and convenient centers of Valhalla uploaded to the Grand Central Terminal internet.

Brace yourself for Temu. It’s got it all. Soon it will be too much.

Wars of value, relevance, and delivering discarded items.

All this didn’t last as long as the Milky way.

The soil’s health is not being discussed on Facebook Reels.

Just like space explorers, microplastics are on a mission through the vastness of our environment.

When you think about it, everyone is basically a hibakusha.

Every brain harbors scenarios that resemble Katsushika Hokusai’s, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.

A fantasy that fearlessly blurs the lines of reality without consent or limits.

Reality endured a ruthless assault, as if every influencer was squeezing, biting, and sucking it dry.

I always mix up the economy and the stock market like it’s a cocktail shaker.

As of now, it’s not a historical drama that you can binge-watch on a streaming platform.

The Roman Empire comes beautifully close, if you’re interested. Yes, beautifully like bigly.

Mississippians and the Buzzard Cult were hip to the limited series.

I’m pretty sure Edgar Cayce was talking about a computer when he said the word crystal. But I’m still not sure.

It was like time was playing tricks on us, with the present and past all jumbled together.

The memories undergo slight alterations as we recall them.

While amnesia happens a lot, some folks say they can remember past lives at Göbekli Tepe.

A flowing line between garbage and newness. Art with a bold line that separates primate from the software enhancer.

There's this commercial that keeps popping up on my screen about immortality.

I'm thinking about moving my memory to a younger clone. This trend is really catching on.

Don’t stress, actual stars shine brighter than any confinement.

Putting butter in your coffee has its limits.

I bid adieu to my B vitamin steak. I will miss you.

Picture a world without milk.

Ice cream melting rapidly, just like time.

Urban punks in Cahokia, rocking our Superphones.

You know how important we are with screens and phones.

Those epic malls and convenient centers of Valhalla uploaded to the Grand Central Terminal internet.

Brace yourself for Temu. It’s got it all. Soon it will be too much.

Wars of value, relevance, and delivering discarded items.

All this didn’t last as long as the Milky way.

The soil’s health is not being discussed on Facebook Reels.

Just like space explorers, microplastics are on a mission through the vastness of our environment.

When you think about it, everyone is basically a hibakusha.

Every brain harbors scenarios that resemble Katsushika Hokusai’s, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife.

A fantasy that fearlessly blurs the lines of reality without consent or limits.

Reality endured a ruthless assault, as if every influencer was squeezing, biting, and sucking it dry.

I always mix up the economy and the stock market like it’s a cocktail shaker.

As of now, it’s not a historical drama that you can binge-watch on a streaming platform.

The Roman Empire comes beautifully close, if you’re interested. Yes, beautifully like bigly.

Mississippians and the Buzzard Cult were hip to the limited series.

I’m pretty sure Edgar Cayce was talking about a computer when he said the word crystal. But I’m still not sure.

It was like time was playing tricks on us, with the present and past all jumbled together.

The memories undergo slight alterations as we recall them.

While amnesia happens a lot, some folks say they can remember past lives at Göbekli Tepe.

A flowing line between garbage and newness. Art with a bold line that separates primate from the software enhancer.

There's this commercial that keeps popping up on my screen about immortality.

I'm thinking about moving my memory to a younger clone. This trend is really catching on.

Don’t stress, actual stars shine brighter than any confinement.

Two Pieces, Giorgia Pavlidou

 

A Vampire Called Eurydice  

 

How comfortable the warm darkness of caskets --

Doubtlessly finer than nowadays’ low-quality blood

 

Still much to my surprise,

Orpheus eventually arrived.

I followed his back for a little while,

bumping against a shadow or two    (more to stay true to the myth instead of really

wanting to)

 

Yet I was curious: “Will he succeed this time around?”  

 

As was to be expected, he turned his head once again --

Tired, stuffy, dark circled eyes looked at me for the umpteenth time.  

He didn’t impress me much; I feel forced to confess.

Or was he a she? Or a they? Difficult to say, today:

 

Even genitals have minds of their own -- on this present day.

 

Relieved that my hero had so blatantly failed once more,

I returned to the comforting darkness of my sepulcher  

(apropos: my relationship with light has never been exceptionally bright).

 

Hades isn’t such a bad place after all, I thought, while my coffin welcomed me back inside.

The embittered Goddess, Persephone, stared at me with her usual pitch-black eyes.

 I drooled gazing back at her magnificent, mean-pale and perforating face.

And before I could even think of rising up, and lick her splendid but insipid dark lips,

her hungry tongue, deep inside my menial and brittle little mouth,

was already done circling around mine:

 

So-so comfortable - I was mandated to think - the convivial darkness of my casket.

Much-much more exquisite and finer than nowadays’ low-quality blood.

Fun Republic

 

Fun Republic was the name of my favourite mall. One of the reasons I loved going there was that it had both a butcher and a bar. The bar was on the top floor. The butcher was on the first.

A few days after I began frequenting what would become my favourite bar, a young female journalist committed suicide. The girl jumped from an indoor bridge on the top floor where the bar was. While I was enjoying my sixth or seventh tequila, I vaguely remember that the bartender tried to convince me that the girl wasn’t a regular.

“Besides,” he said emphatically, “she was sober.” While he was telling me all that, I remember thinking, wow, this man has a huge head. And why does he have hair sprouting out of his ears?

Slightly tipsy and while holding my big plastic bag of meat, I wobbled to see the bridge. I wanted to feel how it is to walk around the spot where someone had just experienced a massive amount of anguish.

Imagine you’re trying out new lingerie, I thought, or enjoying an omelette when you suddenly hear this strange loud thud close to you.

Pacing back and forth on the bridge with my dripping bag, I don’t remember feeling much. I quickly returned to the bar. I needed another tequila. Much to my dismay, however, the bartender refused to pour me one.

A handsome young man with reddish and unusually long hair sat a few stools away from me. A colourful three-to-four feet tall half-human half-monkey hybrid figurine stood next to him. I made sustained efforts to not wonder why that was. When he looked in my direction, I asked him if he knew why no drinks were being served. He told me that the owner didn’t want people to think the girl drank in his bar and then jumped. Other customers who were drinking suspicious lemonades said that this was out of respect for the deceased girl.

It all irritated me. I implored the large-headed bartender with the hairy ears to pour me a drink: “please, bro, I’ll pay you double or even quadruple for another tequila.” He looked at me in a sad way, wobbled his head and made a shrieking sound, perhaps saying something in his dialect, I wasn’t certain, but he surely didn’t offer me a drink.

Feeling disappointed, I decided to leave.

 

Exiting the mall, still dragging around my dripping bag of meat, I saw the artist and his apelike figurine at the parking lot. They were sitting on a stationed Harley Davidson. When I approached them, he suggested going up for drinks.

“But you just said they don’t serve alcohol out of respect for the dead,” I said.

He ignored me and played with his long red tresses. Next, he smiled at me and touched the forehead of the statuette.

“What do you have in this big black dripping bag?” he asked next. I didn’t buy meat that day because the butcher shop was closed, so I agreed to go for a drink with him.

At the bar I refused to drink alcohol. “I rarely drink during the day,” I lied. “What about coffee?” he asked. He looked sexy in his extremely tight jeans. His crotch was bulging out. The figurine, he and his bulge looked wonderful together.  

“Please, if possible, very strong coffee,” I asked the thick-headed bartender. I glanced at the artist, but it seemed as if he looked right through me into nothingness. I did my very best to not wonder why.

I used to drink double or triple espressos back then, but as expected, when it arrived, my coffee wasn’t strong.

“Through the coffee, one shouldn’t be able to see the inside of the cup!” I yelled, upon which a short little man ran off to bring me extra instant coffee on a little plate.

“Don’t worry,” the artist said. He played with his tresses some more and smiled looking out the window. The figurine seemed more figurine-like than earlier, but the handsome artist’s bulge less bulge-like. Taking a sip, I tried observing the bulge through the corners of my eyes. Alas, even with the extra instant coffee it all tasted bland.

Feeling disappointed for the umpteenth time, I left. The artist and the figurine left as well.

Crossing the bridge, I saw that in the meantime a net was spun on one side of the bridge but not on the other.

“Work in progress?” I asked the artist.

“Nope,” he said. “The net will be spun only on one side. You see, I’ve heard that the mall received just enough money to spin a net only on one side.”

He seemed to find this fact funny and laughed loudly. I could clearly see that he didn’t miss any teeth.

I laughed as well and tried observing his crotch a little more, to see if it was still bulging out. What I saw tickled my groin.

“What’s going on,” the artist asked, “your face has turned red.”

“Nothing,” I said, “absolutely nothing. It’s just that I’m experiencing the world being perfect just like the way it is.”

His almost-black melancholy eyes stared at me with this look people have when they don’t understand what is happening, and they’re assessing whether they’re in danger or not.

Nevertheless, he offered to drive me home.

We drove through a slum at breakneck speed. The road had more potholes than asphalt, but that didn’t seem to surprise anyone.

I kissed the artist and the figurine goodbye, entered my apartment, and dropped myself on my bed. After putting the dripping chopped-up body parts in the fridge, I contemplated my day at my favourite mall. I thought of the butcher, the bar, the bridge, the young female journalist, and the strange loud thud at least some customers must have heard. I thought of the artist and his woody friend, the potholes, the slum, and the net spun only on one side of the bridge.

“The world is perfect just like the way it,’ I said to myself, and I smoked some more, observing through my window a crooked yellow laser springing up behind the silhouette of a man standing straddle in between a few wild bushes growing at the side of the potholed street in front of my apartment.

Originally trained in clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. She received her MA in Urdu literature from Lucknow University, India and her MFA in Fiction from MMU Manchester, UK, (though her meetings with visionary LA poet-philosopher Will Alexander have been and still are exceedingly more impactful). Her work has recently appeared in such places as Caesura, Lotus-Eater, Zoetic Press, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Entropy. Additionally, Trainwreck Press (trainwreckpress.com) launched her chapbook inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel in 2021. Ireland-based Strukturriss Magazine selected her as the featured visual artist of their January 2022 issue 3.1. She’s an editor of SULΦUR online literary magazine. 

Anvil Tongue Books published Giorgia Pavlidou's debut collection of poetry in 2022. Copies can be purchased by navigating to the 'Books' tab to the right. 

Selected Works, Soleil Yakita

Absent Father 

Pocketed, whisked away—absent, Father, 

You were suddenly an ensnared creature 

Blank eyes blazing with animal terror 

Gasping, gargling, against the biting steel. 

As the compass needle knows North, Father, 

A great agonal force stirred within you, 

A gnashing, sweeping, unceasing machine 

Indiscriminate, wholly unseeing. 

And later in the yellow dim, Father, 

When moon-pale skin shone mercifully breathless, 

My lips brushed a cool form like a statue 

And sensed the dead air; the emptiness. 

cleansing, mending 

Today my pen is a paintbrush 

cradled in the sleight of my hand. 

It no longer chokes and sputters 

on yesterday’s noxious thoughts. 

I do not wield it as a dagger, 

carving red into my journal. 

Today words unspool in gold ribbons 

from the lithe movements of my wrist. 

Gentle, dancing loops fill the page: 

raspberry jam. . . warm marmalade. . . 

Sleepy-eyed autumn. . . silk sunsets. . . 

Today, 

today my pen rests. 

12.30.2022 

Under the rev’rent hush of the pre-dawn morning, 

the muted whistle of the witching-hour train 

trails in a sleek silver streak through the blue darkness; 

the station awaits in cool adularescence. 

A magic is dream-caught, webbed through the quietude: 

one secret among passengers and observer 

each of us guarded and snuggled comfortably 

against the velvet night’s lust’rous underbelly. 

Today 

Today my body a bloodied gash 

against the faded paisley of my bedsheets— 

pit-marked by the half-moon digs of my nails, 

I weep scab-fluid like a bark-stripped tree. 

I murmur to myself, little blue lies 

just askew from the pulsing vein of truth: 

deoxygenated capillaries 

that bitter my mouth like underripe fruit. 

But a sleek algal film clings to my skin, 

in guarded seclusion it flourishes; 

I revel in the slick cocoon of grime 

with no promise of metamorphosis. 

Yet soon I must shed this warm shroud of filth,  

and beneath it seek some semblance of self. 

Untitled 

In rev’rent prayer and on my tired knees, 

I suckle Death’s slender, icy fingers. 

I lick them until my lips fall numb, 

And my stomach curdles with hot acid. 

Until my mouth tastes of bitter-black ash, 

My jaw slack and my restless mind placid. 

sonnet no. 2 

Do whisper gentle things against my lips,  

that which would fracture, burst, in open air;  

Sweet Nothings—stolen, golden spheres of bliss, 

that float between us fragile, warm and bare. 

Caress my skin with faint and feather touch, 

as rushing breezes rustle flaxen grain; 

Do drench me in a wash of scarlet blush, 

as sunlit forests blaze with amber rain. 

Beneath my circling rings of ribcage reach,  

and press your palmprint flush against my heart; 

Its silken form do gently cup and squeeze, 

to choke the pulse then feel it hard restart. 

Do whisper hidden words into my ear,  

Sweet Nothings lustrous, tender, soft and dear. 

grey matter 

a brooding lethargy like victorian rot: 

all plague masks and posies, corpses and consumption 

words trail soot on the walls, thoughts stain with putrid grease; 

tongue tastes food as if spoonfed from the ashtray 

fine, gritty granules like gravel, sediment, and 

misguided sentiments, unspoken resentments 

swiftly accumulate like thick glacial refuse 

in the warm crannies flush against the optic nerve 

and down the curving corridors within each bone: 

pebbles crowd like teeth in the carnal catacomb 

Soleil is a recent transfer and undergraduate Creative Writing student at Stockton University, and she has just begun to familiarize herself with the local literary community. She works as a library assistant, English tutor, and (unofficial) printer repairwoman at Atlantic Cape Community College. Soleil is also a clarinetist in the Atlantic POPs Community Band, where she can happily immerse herself in wordless rhythm for a few hours each week. She is just beginning to send work out for publication. 

Soleil's poem, grey matter, was originally published online via A Thin Slice of Anxiety:

http://www.athinsliceofanxiety.com/2023/03/respice-finem-self-important-notion-of.html