Hedy Habra

Or Did You Ever Wonder What It’s Like To Have Hot Flashes?

                        After The Souls of the Mountain by Remedios Varo

Imagine a nebulous landscape covered with budding volcanoes

See yourself emerge from one of its peaks head heavy with slumber

Gasping in the rarefied air you enter a liminal space where unlucky few

Forever trapped past conception are condemned to parthenogenesis

 

See yourself emerge from one of its peaks head heavy with slumber

Think of your skin as a primed canvas permeable to imprints

Forever trapped past conception, condemned to parthenogenesis

See how the change of seasons leaves indelible marks all over your body

 

Think of your skin as a primed canvas, permeable to imprints,

You yearn for the sight of a veil billowing on a deserted deck’s caravel

See how the change of seasons leaves indelible marks all over your body

Like the sfumato created by passing a candle over moist paper or canvas

 

You yearn for the sight of a veil billowing on a deserted deck’s caravel

Suddenly a cooling current lassoes drifts unfurling into ashen flames

Like the sfumato created by passing a candle over moist paper or canvas

Or a haze hiding a palimpsest of thoughts carried by windswept fumes

 

First published by Rusted Radishes

From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023) 

 

 

 

Or How Much Of Yourself Remains Within The Walls Of A Home?

                        After Salt Marsh by Jeremy Miranda

 

I wanted to dive into the troubled waters of forgotten memories,

haunt the house of early emotions but found it empty. I wanted to

find the lingering scent of jasmine where jasmine never grew, even

if it wasn’t spring. Unspoken words fall heavily on the kitchen

tiles: a cascade of rough-edged syllables flood the floor. My chair is

glued to the table, I’m trapped within clouds preventing me from

seeing how the marsh grows wider, how walls collapse, spikes and

bluish-green leaves crested with plumes line the edge of the water

where glasswort blushes against sea lavender.

I’d run my fingers over the red, round stems, crush the purple

petals under my teeth to release its essential oils. I can still see the

russet tree’s liquid mirroring, its gnarled roots that seem to reach

up to the sky. Your body awakens each night under my touch,

shortening the distance between my lips and your skin, until your

body remembers, until the sky sinks into water, mist so thick, a

hummingbird floats in minute droplets in suspension. I feel the

current of the first kiss in my curls, our knees shaking.

 

 

First published by World Literature Today

From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023)

 

 

 

Timing

 

It all happened so fast, I can still feel his breath, his lips stripping my

will; skin scorched by his touch, I stood, mouth agape, a still syllable

floating in the air, unable to reverse my wish, already caught in a shell

of bark, twigs tying me tighter than handcuffs: through the interstices

of the ligneous fibers, I saw his silhouette fade into the horizon.

How I wished I could turn the hour hand back: had I only known.

And don’t you think it’s over, I still breathe under my porous mask,

feel sunrays and wafts of warm breeze, and my now awakened

body aches for what might have been. No one seems to know it, but

later, much later, my fate would inspire the torments of Dante’s

suicides trapped in gnarled trees, bleeding at the slightest touch,

lamenting the human form they rejected in life.

 

 

First published by The Smoking Poet

From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)