11/14/2016 1 Comment Six Poems by Ann BlackburnPHOTOGRAPH I wrote a sonnet about the monkey shirt my father wore when he was drunk and posing like an Egyptian – It was yellow with lyrics from some Phish song he’d blare in his bedroom across the house from where my mother slept. I still have the picture he made me take as he slurred threats about leaving. But who would remember this loss – this unseen devotion to self. ATTEMPT #1 I am his silhouette. Wanting impalpable euphoria -- instead an ostensible despair kisses my forehead. The missing goodnights of briefcase holders and world wide webs of un-relatable arachnophobes. Wilted, bruised knees and somersaults. Floors matted with concrete. He was never home -- loving Tokyo’s heated seats. Nine years of never loving me. ALONE Home is a graveyard filled with nonexistent love and incapable company. Bed is made of grass that has turned into tiny sterilized needles waving - come hither - from the infested ground. Comfort is the blood-drained body laying exposed upon the field. Realization is the notion that you’re on your own - you are for nobody and nobody is for you. FALLING The oak’s roots cancerously tie knots around my body. I am stuck between living, feeling dead, and dying but being alone forever. Rescue me please; reality has taken my innocence. Like a star becoming a black hole -- I, too, am on the brink of extinction Dear White Hole Cut in the Sky Like a Snowflake, Your gravity ebbs and flows my body, and your milky sea creates craters in my eyes. Silence whistles me lullabies, but you disappear. You grow smaller and smaller until your absence bleeds through my still blue veins — and I sit on the balcony’s railing, trying to hear your presence. I tell you I wish for waxing, but you always seem to wane away. As though there is enough of you there to dwindle — starless -- until there is nothing left of me, but the sliver of you and your snow-flake wings. WISH #1 I wish I were a scar, drifting anonymously; devoid of the “elsewheres.” My family: the robotic torches in a heatwave. Me: the necrotic wreckage of should haves and no normalcy. I am the bottom of a candle, lit with carbon, dropping nectar. Exiled average. Bio: Ann Blackburn is a student at Sarah Lawrence College where she studies poetry. She is currently working on her manuscript. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Red Paint Hill Poetry Journal, Crack the Spine, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. Her website can be found at: www.annblackburnpoetry.com
1 Comment
Amanda Lau
11/20/2016 10:05:27 am
Your writing is amazing. Very moving and touching. My favorite is Dear White Hole Cut in the Sky Like a Snowflake and Photograph.
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