Nikola

I live for…

mist-kissed blooms

faithful flowers

casual thorns

and growing as an act

as a seedling sown

What is that tangerine animal—

that wanders through my dreams

and hunches on the edges

of the true and make-believe

I crouch, hiding from reality,

and a tiger watches me

Snow weaves into our teeth

and I know joy

by the melt of your smile

frost-filled throat thawed

beneath cloud cavities

sub-zero has never tasted sweeter

Soap froth

I rinse my head out

with washed-up daydreams

as chores become days

and months and so on

—gaze out the dish sink window

at the storybook pastures beyond

tip the lid

and let them spill

all bubbly cerebral fluid

the fields green as gel

I pipe into my mother’s glassware

before I take my rag to them

the limescale conquers

and eats at my reflection

as another empty plate gets added

to the sink

always overflowing…

I want a soul carved

from lens flares

a hum pictured

seen,

and heard,

and felt

a sense developed

oversaturated and overexposed

imprinted in light

temporary

but there

This city’s full of half-phantoms

half-memories, half-pleasures

amber…

that haven of personal mythologies

all-or-nothing

It’s sentiment blued

and built to the clouds

—that thief of time

The Daydream

as sweet as a rhyme

September is a moon-dyed hand—

a laugh made of amber,

lungs filled with leaves—

a breath cackled on a wild breeze

and I am her daughter

sprinting over lantern-shaded land

September is a moon-dyed hand—

a laugh made of amber,

lungs filled with leaves—

a breath cackled on a wild breeze

and I am her daughter

sprinting over lantern-shaded land

We are a legacy of twigs—

a story of insect wings

and raspberry stems

and the wonders

of wild, growing

aging, savage things

Ekphrasis

A brushstroke across a phrase

a chisel to a page

a poem as a painting as a praise

and I

as a person

turning paper into prayer into abstract pathos

I am the human artist

the rough-as-stone

sinking twice as fast

crooner in the marshes

but I know toadsong,

and moonlit avenues,

and the step

of the no-longer-stranger

and I am the artist as human

I grow in cracked clapboard

doll houses

where eternities blink by

like mosquito zappers

like ‘come home’ porch lights

my face peers

reflected in the raccoon’s eye

up up up I go

where the dust

kisses the sky

Cotton candy skies

Melt across my tongue

Above on the telephone lines

Static weeps on phone calls hung