6/13/2017 Poetry by Amanda StovicekThe Purple Is A Bruise For FS that spreads a circle of red skin thrumming to life beneath the surface. Oh this is where we really begin, in injury fool-proof plastic bottle and small imprint of your birthdate, or some other significant number. I want to say sorry. To be your sunflower opening petals in summer and dropping seeds in fall and letting everyone remember how you couldn’t come home. But no one talks about that. Buries that deep in Ohio dirt and doesn’t dig it up like a time capsule. No one will find it in new millenia. No one will uncover the recorded phone call and sympathize with your father even as your mother cried, even as your hands were turning blue and begging for bruise because blood to the surface means warmth--a warmth you couldn’t capture in winter breath in vapor on the window. Oh I want to say I’m sorry. I cannot even fold my tongue to those sounds. I press them stupidly into the ground next to the sprouting summer sunflowers. The Lovers We are growing roots on summit precipice, dug our heels in. The dirt showing patterns of every curve—footprint, thigh, and lip. Cliff edge calling the names of our bodies, the sweeping frost drawing lace up our necks vertigo blue and the open sky below: I wanna be a bird you say and your throat morphs on the rocks trying to warble. The sky has wings for you I say as our roots fall away like clothes and nothing holds onto us anymore. Hypoxic I’m soaked like an oil spill. You can call it dysphoria, but either way no trick of skin can hide it—in the right light, my eyes limp, the wilt of my smile. These lines break through like the fin of a shark in sea shallows. I knit myself together, purl the bad news into my muscles. I fishtail. I hydroplane. I am what’s underneath the concrete, or the canopy of trees. I quit the sun and soap myself with darkness. I drip like sagging pipes or gray stains in ceiling plaster. Do not come near I’m haunted, wailing. I funeral myself. I grieve and grieve again. Bio: Amanda Stovicek is a writer and teaching artist from Northeast Ohio. She is a recent graduate of the NEOMFA program. Her work has appeared in The New Old Stock, Rubbertop Review, Jenny Magazine, and Us For President, among others. Comments are closed.
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