Poetry by Bee Morris

            Sippanont Samchai CC



The Big Finale

The poet is a magician,
their saintly verbs rightfully knighted,

mixing metaphors like paint colors
as an excuse to say ochre aloud,

               & to believe 
that sound, like so many skeletons,
rests in a beyond that none of us have to name

for we were had & named
               not by our choosing,
since procrastinating blood.

How a century tastes: I don’t remember,
but everyone had gunpowder teeth
& smiling was all fireworks.

Explosions cannot happen in reverse
is a reminder of time: a forward thing:
                felt as it is heard as it is seen.

If the sun & moon are not rivals,
we should all start loving each other—   
& secondly, distance makes no sense to me
because of how intimate it can be.

The end of the world won’t beget aftermath, 
               only after,           & you don’t need to calculate a thing,
just put your head here & let me feel you feel me breathing.





Poem With A View of the Ocean

Radio giving voice to unspoken aches,
bruises diminishing into an implication of lavender,

soundtrack of goldenrod afternoon.
Honey falling from the clouds in place of rain,

cleansing the world with its thick sweet.
Companions sharing body heat,

huddled like penguins against the chill,
a quilt slipped over the shoulders

of an old armchair.
A boardwalk pricks the flesh of nighttime,

scattered with lonesome fishermen
falling in line with the constant brag of the sea

and hoping to pull forth a bounty.
Another meticulous ribbon of memory

swandives toward the eye of a needle,
threaded and plunged through the present;

twitches of unobscured recollection
seduced by the warningless wink of wistfulness.

I will never be younger than I am right now.
Every second falls from my lips like a clean bone.

It’s been a long century of a day,
sweetheart, I could use another dose of you.





​Alterations

Share a tender moment with the floorboards. Mostly, 
evoke something important about enlightenment. 

The last stretch before sleep or the first stretch after waking.
Something like that. Do not trust when boiling water says 

"suddenly" to you. Wash the sheets. It's been a few weeks now. 
Invest in noise cancelling headphones to silence the soles of your shoes. 

In any case, settle the blame. Balance the inconsistencies. Her eyes 
were no cliche of sapphires, but rich in a new way, like a pulse.

In color, more akin to the breadth of a freshwater lake. The heart 
wants you to peel back the greyscale, or at least break like a sentence 

in climax. Or else nostalgia's quiet punishing. A dogeared novel 
on forgotten. Any poem that ends in angels has something to hide.​


​

Bee Morris is a poet living in South Florida. A finalist for the 2020 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize and runner-up for the Miracle Monocle Award for Young Black Writers, their work can be found in The Rising Phoenix Review, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, and elsewhere.

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