Poetry by Ella Parsons

Mary Magdalene

To the girl with skin like poplar ash, green eyes glinting-
Your allergy rimmed eyes make your emerald irises glow.
Those deep-set eyes rim your face so sallow, dark circles,
Cupped like angel wings, with two swipes of concealer
You can fake being human. Three ruby pearls on pink lips.
Now you are passing for flesh and beating blood.

Wayward yucca plant一 tensile green stems frowning.
Lyrical shores lapping for more. Pull back, take back,
Setting sun, Hit reset again until you roll out at noon.
Lick back in grey sheets; you are on the wrong side
Of a sunrise again, filling with gossamer gloom. Fog
Rolling in over waves, under moonlight, at the seaside
Let it come, Let me be undone一 in the salutations of the shores.

The purple martins are coming一 and going once more.
Your wasted future on ornithology, at the parties
You will always be such a bore. Half sung promises
Made to the arts, efforts you put forth, neither biology
Nor chemistry will sing your praises. What names!
What names! You have all but collected, stolen
From tombstones and cellists, from botanicals,
And pamphlets. You've stolen sweet treasures and histories,
What names! What names! You've yet to write their stories.

To the girl wanting to grow, while getting thinner-
Your skeleton key rings sliding off silken fingers.
Forgetting your locks, cutting them all off.
A little shorter now, only a little lighter, but how?
Keys tied around your neck, locked around the sunset.
Walking along the marshes of the Camargue, where
Mary's boat ran ashore. Wild bulls with black hides glinting,
Bodies dark as a night where you can't find your keys,
Stumbling drunk to not wake a dreaming roommate.
Those stubborn creatures-cut from the cloth of night,
Stare over estuaries, nostrils dilating, perfectly still
Until a storm of sun-bleached stallions break away
Tearing through mud flats once more. Flamingoes
Breaking over the horizon, tides rising with the moon.

Let the blood go pumping through bicuspid valves
As twilight haze of your night sours by Cupid's arrow一
I swear he missed, what a splendid gift一to show up alone.
All lipstick primed, doe-eyed for new dances. Dear girl,
Good thing you never bother with mascara, As your salt
Solution does no remedy. Failing to obtain what solution?
As wet wands drip down your cheeks, Ask yourself with a
Still beating heart, Still pumping lungs, straining to breathe一
Take yet another pill一 It it worth it? Not quite.  
Forget it now, as we are at the sea. So breathe. Through
Inflamed lungs, What whining waves are coming to me?

To the girl with skin like poplar ash, Bring your
Doubting hand to pray, hang your mouth agape
Like the Mary Magdalene, as Donatello your
Body cut to sway. Popular wood all tarnished with gold,
Gilded with guesswork, yet another doubting soul.
Your empty mouth parts with fresh spoken words.
Come on, come forth, let your wooden hands touch.
You are changing now, coming out like a rat from
Your own woodworks, like a phoenix dowsed
From your own drowsy flames. Your ashes
Covered in blushes and concealed, come you,
Little doubter一 come out, your knees down
To the earth. Come, put your lies to bed.
Pray to the rain with ruddy feet. Demand
The coincidences you see, with some bad luck
Your magic might leak.


​

Again

There is silver in girls hair; they are moonlight kissed insomniacs,
Stress blemished stars streaking in their hair, beams of starlight.  
Under their shimmering eyelids, they wake from violent stupors,
Never quite able to escape tenuous realities and haploid pasts.
Cautious fingers trace, checking the checkered checkerboard.
Graceless heartbeats pump and cool, oxygenated blood
With a terrible sigh, carbon dioxide is exhaled and a choice is made;
A piece is moved. Green velvet lined bases are traded, black for white
On black and white. And so we set back, leaning back, our backs
Against the stacks. In the oceans of books, finding solitude
Among the spines of others; libraries within school’s locked
Walls are granite struck, so the nightingale starts to sing.

Copper stories traded like coins, confided into coin purses.
Serendipitous silence, reveals darker perpetrators, songs
Aspirated, in spite of a bounded past.  The nightingale
Perched in her cage still speaks, as cigarette smoke rises from
The library stacks. Fruitless juvenile delinquency was traded
For the frayed aesthetics of antique wire, which conspires
With the melancholic tobacco ashes. For chapters and novels
Digress in delirious obsession, hunters chasing nymphs.
Poetic sentiment was exchanged to ghosts. Apollo makes
His crown fastened from laurel leaves. The former vanilla lies
Are exchanged in half quiet rooms fractured by illegitimate silence.

Beyond stone walls, past columns and plated windows,
The sky is dressed in fading effervescence. Moon tucked into blues
Like a shimmering eyelid, surrounded by freckles on humid
Indigo cheeks of a shimmering goddess, half waking and half wanton.
Drifting to sleep, into regressions linear and swirling into the cardinal
Rims of saints and dreamers, of molecules and atoms,
To structures and infinitely bound spaces. The dawn fails to wake
The sleeping lids of the moon. With gold leaf on my lips-I smile.
Running my fingers over bird cages and quiet locks escaped songbirds
Flutter and chirp, between book stacks. Passing overhead,
Drab plumage flutters, stories repeated, I'm dawn licked
And coffee stained, I pick up another chess piece, I will begin again.

​

Ella Parsons is an anthropology major graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a BA in Anthropology. She will start her Masters in Public Health at University of California Berkeley in the Fall. Ella aspires pursue research within the field of environmental epidemiology while continuing to document her adventures in global health and remaining a poet on the side.

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