margaryta
Let my poetry speak for me, so listen carefully / (Twitter: @Margaryta505) / / “Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.” / — John Berger
Her mother named her White Dahlia, the consequence
of unplanned pregnancy while studying forensics. Or so
she told the boy selling orchids in popcorn bags (he ran out
of sheet music and poetry books). Renaming her Orchid
he’d ram into her all night so their breathing would fog up the
windows, an eternal 21C. A common misconception:
flowers have no bones. He learned what it means to
have a backbone when she broke his fangs
like sugar cubes.
A glass slide is too small a coffin for one convinced she
was “beloved”. The strawberry cigarette ash
should have been the tip-off. Rarely
will a botanist throw their own child under Industry’s wheels.
Aug 3, 2015
Aug 3, 2015 at 9:19 PM UTC
I sold my soul for a memory of you, one not
even long enough to be recorded
on vinyl and small enough to trap in
the empty pen I used to write
down these words. In a sense you’re now
eternal since souls are boundless and
yours is now my ink. Don’t warn your children
of strangers or drugs, rather of soul buyers
on street corners at 8PM in July. Rejection
itself is enough of a drug.
(Sold/lost: a reverse connotation where one letter
is enough to overlook the mistranslation)
Jun 8, 2014
Jun 8, 2014 at 2:20 PM UTC
At 5 I was convinced I was
a flower
whose vocation was imitating
their final hysterical
wail
once Winter awoke from its
anorexia.
I pleaded my case with
a botanist
whose seamstress wife consented to stitch
a tutu of Kadupul
flowers,
like a fairy godmother warning of their death at
dawn.
At 16 I finally danced
their goodbye,
petals whisked off as if molted
layers of skin
and only when at the end I stood naked
did the concept of death have
definition.
Jun 7, 2014
Jun 7, 2014 at 7:13 PM UTC
Nothing lulls to sleep quite like concrete waves
of endless tarmac roads,
the car christened Frau Marienkäfer by raindrops
of a passing thundercloud.
Baby butterfly whose pigments are smeared across
the windshield –
were you chasing the ‘Big City’ dream like
all the rest?
May 25, 2014
May 25, 2014 at 8:03 PM UTC
To girls who dream of being fairy princesses: turn your
balconies into paradise greenhouses, and every
night sing each of the Thumbelinas
to sleep. Frost's flowers crowd beneath my fingers, the
young moon peaking in. I dare not invite you again -
your mind exploded into a nebula last time you saw
so many lights. My tiny Thumbelinas have gotten
married, with Thumbelinas of their won. I kiss
their frostbitten flowers awake. I promised. Blue
fingertips have become a norm, a childhood
reminder of a wish for blue blood. It thaws
outside. Wee Thumbelinas weep. The ferns
unfurl. My lullabies make plants awaken, not from the
beauty, but of dying loyalty.
May 2, 2014
May 2, 2014 at 5:33 PM UTC
Never cook with a fairy tale omnibus
open on a kitchen table,
or confuse salt with sugar.
Cherry-pit pies are like eating dragon bones, as to
be expected of one taught to
never cook with a fairy tale omnibus,
safer to love a beast than to open up to
strangers, precise butchers cutting hearts
open on a kitchen table;
I love you like salt, preach obedient daughters, omitting
the ease to mix dream with wake
or confuse salt with sugar.
Apr 25, 2014
Apr 25, 2014 at 4:15 PM UTC
one of the gifts for your birthday was
nonexistent constellations etched in your skin
cascading down your shoulders evoking
subdued squirms
my ever gallant one
I swore they'd guide you home
these nebulas of crooked flora dusted
with sugary swirls of the Milky Way
a biblical formula of unquestionable permanence
but
it was I who followed the ink which
washed down your drain
through sewers out to sea
it was permanence
shelter
which skin couldn't give
and in those lullabies the ocean sang I
saw the stars clearer
a better map than all your body combined
could ever give to cure cosmic wanderlust
Apr 11, 2014
Apr 11, 2014 at 9:27 PM UTC
I can’t forgot those
butterfly eyes filled up with
caterpillar lies
Apr 2, 2014
Apr 2, 2014 at 8:47 PM UTC
make me a gramophone – sew
it from the scraps of our shattered past,
the vinyl our memories that play
‘round on repeat. to them
we’ll dance around in animal masks like
the beasts we are.
a lion purrs,
a walrus roars,
a seahorse crushes bone,
and when we’re done we’ll rip apart
our fickle gramophone.
Mar 29, 2014
Mar 29, 2014 at 5:26 PM UTC
you were a sailor of the stars
who scooped me up into your arms
from cosmic whales you rescued me
and plucked me from their sleepy sea
I was a damsel in distress
the common living human mess
I was too much for you to bear
and so you tossed me back with care
Mar 29, 2014
Mar 29, 2014 at 11:47 AM UTC