Marigolds
The season is ripe and the seeds take root
in the caverns of my eyes.
Spindling roots with secret urgency,
tying knots from hidden capillaries.
Soon,
in a gesture of begging,
these still-green buds will reach for the sun,
burst through skull,
and I will scream.
Each season I chew and spit the clumps of dirt
towards a ruthless summer sky. Each season,
I tear the roses free, cut myself on bladed
leaves the petals puddling at my feet the season
is ripe.
The air is sickly sweet.
I don’t know what to do.
Please.
This hibiscus, this jungle flame,
this cactus tower in my throat,
this mountain sage.
All searching in their violent quest for light.
Let me put away my tired scythe
and let the marigolds bloom
softly
down my back.
Ode To An American Quilt
Note: This is an ekphrastic piece based on this quilt whose creator, a 19th century enslaved woman from Virginia, is unknown. https://imgur.com/a/xi5Dcjp
Take your red string and pull down the sky.
A drop of blood in the shape of a rooster
crowing twice is all I see,
patches of memory not my own but
some other woman’s.
Little brown toes dip into
mud mounds and grass and it
still feels like home.
The rooster crows a third time.
These dark eyes which can’t see
further than the thick rotting fence can see
far-off constellations of nesting birds
and all the things
our mothers taught us.
She took her red string and pulled me
down, down
past the checkered cloth
and the dinner table
where she sat to love and eat and
love again
fiercely
where she sat to unwind spools
of scarlet thread.
And wagon wheels and flowers and heaven and sex
and man and woman and angels and blood
and chicken eggs —
all spinning circles laid over
spinning circles!
One century apart,
she and I lay our backs
across the heat of religion,
across the warmth
of a full belly,
across all the things
our mothers taught us.
Maria
You’re asking me to trust order,
an improbable thing.
I can trust the diameter of a circle
but you’re asking too much from a hurricane.
Too much from a name stuffed
like cotton into hungry mouths
and sheets of metal screaming
suffer suffer suffer.
Too much from a lightning pinwheel
Fibonacci nightmare still spinning
threads in our dreams.
You say you know what’s probable,
the improbable yet possible.
You hold your projected conjectures
close to your heart.
Yet no eye has swallowed home more completely than this
and it all started with a circle
which was,
by the way,
perfect in diameter.
Curled Up
I’m all black hair big thighs pink lips small tits
and love and sand between my starlit toes
a thousand fossil shells made into plates
or bowls, a vase that catches moonrise in
an opal glow that hurts to watch sometimes.
i cast a net over the sky and caught
a flailing shark the color of blue ink
and teeth so white and sharp I felt them just
by looking in. he asked if he could have
a piece of me and I said that he could.
my skin is only silk and heat, no shell
and now he’s fossilized somewhere between
the crescent curve of neck and hips.
Natalia del Pilar is a queer Puerto-Rican & Colombian poet and storyteller based in Washington, DC. Her poetic explorations of the weird, the whimsical, and the historical have appeared in award-winning publications such as Strange Horizons and Rogue Agent Magazine. For more about her, visit www.storiesbynatalia.com or subscribe to her newsletter, The Iridescence, at https://theiridescence.substack.com/.
Image: DKDEVS, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
