Jessicarrot

I wrote this in college during my Anthropology of War class. The subject was obviously Bikini Atoll, site of nuclear testing in the Pacific.

I am amazed what this world has done to itself
The flash and terrible roar of might
Scorching everything in its path
We are left weak and ignorant
Our skin flapping about like goat’s ears
pierced and punctured with an ascetic silence
We are emptied, closed, muted to it.
Our hands and bellies are loud with the evidence
Invisibly conquering, compromising our senses
Mutilating our limbs
There is no cure.
On our bodies is written volumes of injustice,
And we die quietly, anonymous and forgotten.

I’ve been searching through old files remembering people I’ve forgotten, reading letters.  Do you remember letters?  Its been a decade since I got a letter.  I’m amazed that hand-written letters ever even existed.  Anyway, I was amused by some of my old poetry.  I’m not sharing the horrible stuff.  Re-reading that was punishment enough.  I thought these were sweet though.  They were written while I was engaged to my husband.  Since we’re coming up on our 11th anniversary, it feels appropriate.

Summer evening
Several brackish pears dangled from your face
As if a fruit could bend and drip so languidly
I feel myself as a part of you
Sometimes–its like
a quandary between sleeping and consciousness.
The night is hot and a breeze
cools my dangling feet.
You throw me an alkaline kiss and it shocks me to
Oblivion.

Love
You leave me
with litanies of sapid kisses
Love lorn and bruised
by affection
In the retroversion of time
Seismic shuddering
would accompany
your absence.
The sanguine quality
of your sigh
would fall flatly
with a thud, heavy
and vacant.
The echoes would call out
for the sound of your breath
and hear only silence
careen leisurely by…

* I just had to add this one

Forever
He is like a pallid leaf
More green and pure and real
than any other
He can see from right to left
left to right–everything
he is curled around my heart
with cursive glances
Poured through my blood with long silence
Captured all my senses in
the the abyss of adoration
With him, I remember how to
feel the world as children do.
Everything is now.
Colors have flavors and smells
And life is distant.
I am immortal, with him.