AS a leaf autumnally
As a leaf autumnally pitching in
wind, I am ravished by the airs of your
mouth. Tumultuous I fly, bending, more
corrupt with every spineless form of sin.
I collapse continually, again.
With ancient hands you seasonally pour
decay in my ripe buds, for, on Earth’s floor,
I’d received too much tenderness of skin,
more than you care to comply with. Veiny
contempt spirals with pollen as a new variety
to lovemaking, and hands stretch empty, brown.
The petulant stem I am quakes, grainy
limbs forming foliage of impiety.
As your leaf, I toss like a mind in sundown.
anonymity
how you do reconcile
the dying breath
of the flickering fluorescent young?
their waning lights of ecstasy
throughout weekly hazards
are simulations of warmth.
the impoverished and the empowered
have no battle, no voice
to reprimand repressions.
the waves
wash like an acid,
a cloak of erasure
(the game’s over)
cleanses those
patients whose patience
dwindle with memory.
the embezzling Alzheimer
summits pinnacles
where
the girls walk
with arms
hugging shoulders,
slumped
in congeniality,
conspiring against
those renegades.
they are putting the vacuum
to use
so be fit, be put
to sleep eternally,
be happily
sucked off,
have the liveliness teased out
from underneath
the skin
(the crevices of our brain
beg the mercy death).
ALL my pretty loves
Where has Touch gone, my stairway to rapture?
Heaven’s rope twists meaning, and my pretty
loves all collide like infidelity
to acknowledge my dead eyes—lust’s fracture
bled from the core to external stature.
Fingers create celestial cities
on skin no more, and the bed is gritty.
Stainless sheets swath, ridicule, and capture
my throat as I watch you pulling away,
into that embrace of nothing, your first
warmth. I’m the infant restored to the womb,
asphyxiated, red, and alone. They,
all my pretty loves, regard the drowning thirst
of their wanton woman in her caustic tomb.
armageddon
the almighty architect
with arms akimbo,
“why, why?
I loved you,
but you loved yourselves
alone”
heavy heavens weigh
with inamorato’s tears
skyfall
the angels weep
as they dismantle their
feathered wonders,
crying,
“but alas, humanity is dead!
where now lies the distinction
between man and demon?”
their golden tears falling
just to blacken and
disintegrate,
the angelic colony
disintegrates,
reduced to black soot,
for with their failure,
they are no more worthy
of the kingdom of heaven
than ground pollution
mourning winds carry
dust of their lonesome bodies
floral aromas
the skeletal souls
(if you can claim their souls),
rattle, splinter, bow with burden,
existence dwindling,
with each
dripping
of the increasing dead,
a ceaseless pondering,
“can you possibly ebb away
that which had no being before?”
and the remaining mutations,
helpless against devils’ whims,
whittle, wheedle, pierce away
with relentless chisels,
attempting to force forms
into stony molds
but breaking bones instead
at his giddy show
director Beelzebub laughs
puppetry
the black forces,
with eternal thirst,
do not feed passively
but whisper sweet nothings
to aid their feast,
with tasty dissimilation,
“I always loved you more”
morsels of their bods
constitute heavy rainfall
armageddon
ARE you touched, my love
Are you touched, my love, accounted for? Who
scoops the soul out of gray squalor and brushes
the spirit with watercolored thrushes
feeding in foliage? Those honeydew
palms of yours perfectly hold my seeded brew,
my stringy body. In the curve that hushes
sense, I might hang myself off your luscious
veins. Black lashes give breeze, I bend: bamboo.
I want to twirl around your long fingers
like a grass blade, whistling green tunes, like a bird
delicately searching the earth for seeds.
Among your yard my frame wants to linger
a little long, rather than premature.
I want to replace all the baleful weeds.
botanical wax
today, I don’t quite
reach verbal expectancy,
my small calls fall
just shy of the giants’
selective hearing, allowing
porous sound to dribble
out in bulbous pulses.
reverberated vibrations spore
in grainy shallows of my makeshift
garden, rotted with knowledge
that I’ve hit bedrock bottom
turned wild, my unsatisfied
paradigms heighten on
a shoe-string kite, my noose
imprinting the guiltless sun’s
mustard fluff with diamond
desperation. fingered pollination
pulls the rope taut and spanks
with red discipline, so I reflect
dewily, dripping off bare-bottomed
children until their mothers clip rooted
attitudes clean, holistically cultivating
my incoherent matter, mastered
fashionably by their palms
sunk in the cankered paddock,
my sorrow is slivered sleek
on fertility’s easy edge, a seedling’s
dreams forgotten, merely synthesized
for potted decor, the dilapidated
statue of botanical wax.
can you believe it?
I stand so still and slight,
a twig-thin archetypal prime
slapped into shape
***
Emily Ellison is a second year MFA poet at Texas State University, where she also works as an Instructional Assistant for their English faculty. Her work has appeared in Literary Yard, After the Pause, and Haiku Journal, and is upcoming in several places. Emily lives in San Marcos, Texas with two cats, of whom the squirrels are curious, and an abundance of plants.
