"You said you were a sun now
with your very own devoted satellite."
Tori Amos
"Doughnut Song"
Boys for Pele
I catch prayers in attempt to penetrate the heavens, I kick over bits of interstellar dust, dislodge cinder blocks from the moldering walls of abandoned buildings. Binary code of the mind, eyescars & heartsores, festering. How shall I greet thee, then, Winter, after you have brought such destruction unto me? The songs of elemental change are silent now, all the time. I am the embodiment of neglect. This is what you've done to me: my eyes are moons:
they no longer reflect any light.
spring/summer 2006; summer 2012
When I walk through your perception, ashes fall around me. I breathe through a soft tube that runs through the pierced organs of all my failed poetry. Today marks three years since you petrified my kidneys. In the darkness, I handed you my heart, (my?) voice says. Adamant. With my nails it draws the face of the cave. A circle of black takes shape in the shapeless blackness. In between the closed parentheses read: epochs, then, of summer, of Celan's black milk, of clotted honey, of your hollowed out heart. Together we cultivated only snakes. Hollow me out a grave I will come home. Dawntime, the stars start to flicker & the evening languor distantly echoes the already-exhaled emptiness before dissipating into the (w)hole of the unknown.
spring/summer 2006; summer 2012
Please post flyers, disseminate information, never stop asking / questions. Give some of
your time,
because she gave all of her blood.
To be selfish was easy. To be cruel. To ignore Catherine, to mock her to cross her
out was too easy for too many people.
I think we all imagined her mother's agony: try losing
a child to the fluctuating moods of a monster
who wore your brother's / face, try to imagine crawling
into the dank, aphotic space
where Catherine's body is, to imagine your daughter dying; to have no hope
of ever finding her.
& Catherine? To be spellbound by one's tormentors, to be heart-scarred by cruelty,
yet desperate for acceptance & soul-starved for love was what Catherine lived
& died through
each day.
Alone & in agony, with no hope of being found, she could only wonder
if she would be remembered by those she had worshipped, those who had
tortured her.
I knew Catherine; you did, too.
We both know that's what she thought of in the end.
It made dying
that much harder.
spring/summer 2006; summer 2012
Michelle Greenblatt has been published in The Argotist Online, Hamilton Stone Review, Moria, Shampoo, elimae, Coconut Poetry, Big Bridge, AUGHT, Zafusy, BlazeVOX, X-stream, Word for/ Word, Admit Two, The Anemone Sidecar, Frank's Home, LitVision, Generator Press, and Otoliths. These poems are from her second book, Ashes & Seeds, which is forthcoming from The Argoist Online.
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