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

Science 101

Like the universe
I’m expanding –
sadly, not nearly
the way I had hoped.
Our physics teacher
erroneously told us
objects lose mass
as they approach       
the speed of light
and yet
as I race
towards my own
beacon at the end
of the tunnel,
it seems gravity
has bulked me up
considerably,
fed early and late
by all the crow eaten,
the anger choked down
and disappointments
swallowed
in order to keep
my seat at the table –
periodically hoping
for some catalyst
to bring about
an elemental shift
before the arrival
of eternity.

N.T. Chambers has led an interesting life before becoming a writer. Among many jobs held were: cab driver, bus driver, sales drone, pizza deliverer, wine merchant, improv actor, editor, educator, professional counselor, and, of course, every writer’s “go to” job – bartender. The author’s works have been published in the following magazines and journals: Grassroots, In Parentheses, You Might Need to Hear This, The Elevation Room, Wingless Dreamer, Months to Years, New Note Poetry, Bright Flash Literary Review, Quibble, Indolent Books, Banyan Review, Inlandia, The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Decadent Review, Emerald Coast Writers, Share Literary Journal, Bluebird Word, Red Coyote, Bookends Review, Flint Hills Review Anthology, Gabby & Min Publications, Blaze Vox 23, SBLAAM, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Cool Beans, Black Coffee Review, Salmon Creek Journal, The Journal of Expressive Writing, WILD Sound Writing Festival and Mantis.

Featured image in this post is “Physics Class” Featured image in this post is by Diana Elagina, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

SURFACES

Winter’s hand. Damp streets. Morning’s glare
on clouded windows. March the third.

Light whittles branches to brushstrokes.
We are not fooled by the appearance of things.

Fear in its little tomb wakes with a sigh.

We are not fooled by what is
behind the appearance of things.

Sleep deprived, god and the devil sit
in the hospital cafeteria.

Fear spins its little web.

THE ELECT

In the barrens among twisting pines,
god presses his body into the sand,
fistfuls of twigs. Pine needles mark his hands.
That the devil makes music is a lie.

The devil is a glass echo chamber,
and god has forgotten his own name.
He can no longer remember his realm;
he has no memory of the number

of the Elect. In the way that worms
eat the earth without end, the turning sand
of the world flows through the Elect and
the devil fears water in all its forms.

Overhead, night spins through its iron vault.
When I woke, my lungs were salt.

Michael Gushue’s books are Sympathy for the Monster, Gather Down Women, Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, The Judy Poems with CL Bledsoe, I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey with CL Bledsoe, and, in collaboration with Kim Roberts, Q&A For The End Of The World.

Image: Olaf, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons