Poetry By Lara Torea

         Seth Sawyers CC




things i must say before i leave


i.    there’s  a  myriad  of   hyperboles   i   keep   in
      this  little  cardboard  box   where   the   rings
      that  turn  my  fingers  green   get   ready   for
      burial.  one   night   i   gathered   some  of  the
      oldest    stars    god    was    selling   &   flinged
      them   to  encrust   onto   my   newly   gouged                                                         
      wound.      the     phonemes     in      pilgrimage
      loiter    like    beheaded     phantoms     behind
ii.   the doors you left ajar, their voices  my   only
      testimony.    my   mother’s  prayers    demand
      orthodoxy.  pluto  warps   its  own    orbit. the
      brain  increases  in   rifts  as   it    leaps  into  a
      razorblade    for   the  fifth     time   today: the
      latitudes    widen:    two    axis    juxtapose    in
      denial.  why  are  you leaving is  exodus’   tribal
iii.  chant,  it smolders in your tongue,   bleeding
      gums     reign    supreme.     a      grandfather’s
      chagrin   is   more    than   enough. who  am   i
      telling?  my   waste of lineage? a   felled   pine
      of  relativity?  the   axe  sits   in  the   corridor.
iv.  it    speaks    to    me    in     lengthy     syllables.





I do sometimes wonder

about the secret things. Patience and 
brittleness and the way your fingers
linger and then brush off against this

fabricated cosmos. A sort of magnetism
permeated in vitriol, cerulean as havoc,
as suffocation, as drain. All-consuming.

I wonder when the empyrean waltzes
around this meter and a half, careful,
quiet, conquering. I wonder as I watch you

spit out each consonant as if burning,
as if poison. Lost like a bird in
mellifluousness. This, ourselves,

swallowed by the sweet, the sly, the
searing. And when the sky rifts open like
an eggshell and the light hits and abases and

defies I cannot help but surrender. I wonder,
sometimes, alone at night, celestial dome
spreading above me in perpetuity.

I wonder at work and back home and when
the sun gets red and transcending,
foreshadowing, an obvious metaphor.

The times you water the flowers in my
meadow, I wonder, I wonder when you’re
away and building a different life and even

when I am not in it I wonder. When death
takes me to become one with soil and all
those planes are lost and I am nothing but

illness to land I will wonder. Transience
doing its doing, myself adrift and sedated,

I wonder.

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Lara Torea is always in love with something. She enjoys television about the failed marriage's aftermath, cats, the beach in cold weather, Billy Joel, learning about silly things from space. Her words have been published or are forthcoming in Limelight Review and INKSOUNDS Collective. Otherwise, she tweets @melarancholic.
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