Poetry Suite by Darla Himeles
“alive & determined to live, all the way to the unfathomable depths”
Poetry by Darla Himeles
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Tony the Cat
Against the garage door hurled
Tony like a javelin, in his tuxedo
coat, with his animal shriek, a body
Dad could twist in his hands,
a soft body, proxy for Mom’s—
or mine, maybe, if his rage had ever
been tempted. Tony survived,
as did we all somehow, before disappearing
like three dogs before him, no matter
how many fliers Mom and I stapled
to telephone poles, no matter how many
shelters we entered, begging.
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Breach
Trust your stomach and thighs’
clenching. That dank room
with its round bed and too-small
window births only dead-end
flashbacks: self as teenage
Olympia with choker and pinched
nipples, a hollowed peach-fuzz
belly into which he pours molten
wax. Into which he
pours and pours. Frosted window
glass, the light murky and viscous.
Billy Idol’s “White Wedding”
floods the parentless air, body
bent, then, like a seven. Maybe
what happens next must. And so
the breach will spasm for years.
And so the mind will blank behind
the dungeon door thrust shut. No
lover will glance that tender skin
without your legs and back jerking.
You buck cloven-hooved,
then fawn, eyelashes slow through
hyperventilation, face and feet numb.
Fourteen years old, your puffed eyes
trace stucco constellations. Child,
you’ve done nothing wrong.
Here: climb those dusty milk crates. Slip
this way (deep breath)
beneath window glass.
No ears can hear or
eyes grip us. It’s been
twenty- three years.
Wait ’til you see how
our some -day beloved’s
slick hands knead cocoa
butter into our cracked
soles, how breezes blow
crisp, sweet, through our
future rooms—vanilla, coffee, lavender—
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Still Your Hand
Another drawn-blinds Saturday
when the slits of my light-
sensitive eyes blur
Zebras in dry grass
become hair across your face
Somewhere a hand whispers
to my leg to stay still
Here I slip in and out of sleep
Sticky lips barely shut
whistle lightly
as a wrecking ball splits
the walls, the bed,
forcing our bodies
beneath our house,
smashing us with soil-
infused concrete chunks
and still your hand
upon my leg
the light making hair of grass
your lips lifting sweat
as if we are safe
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Poem to My Therapist about the Abyss
Between sessions my Ferris wheel turns backward,
against time, & drowned selves surface like murky fish,
little Darlas barely glimpsed as night darkens the pier
over which the wheel spins. I once spun a few lunch breaks
on this wheel’s cool plastic seats, a girlfriend or grief
saddled beside me. The ocean spread before us
like glittered marble crushed my lungs: I’d never be
whole. Whole parts of ourselves cower, traumas our bodies
bury, as mine did, I’d thought, years before Santa Monica
reopened the bright wheel my mind revisits when anxious,
& when I wrangle memory into phrases like hurling telephone,
like nest of yanked hair, & when I holler for the conductor to halt,
you remind me—breathe, ground—that beyond the dazzling wheel
are the wide worn slats of the pier my bare feet have walked,
the end of which is the same ocean as from above, but up close:
fish bodies darting: white queenfish, silver surfperch birthing
live fish from their own miraculous flesh: deep blue light
& shadow weaving through currents: a whole body of salt-licked bodies
alive & determined to live, all the way to the unfathomable depths
I once called abyss.
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Prayer for a Marriage
after Steve Scafidi
When we are old, hunched and softened
by time’s loose fingers, may hunger throb
its sore muscle a random Tuesday
afternoon and keep us from dinner plans
with friends. May day darken
around our graze-and-grab-happy
hands, whose secret knowledge blushes us
even then. May the rhinoceros
in your pelvis bruise mine into sunset
and our penguin-fingers fly slick
underwater. And may we kiss
in the open street, three hours late,
before swaying our wearied bodies to eat.
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Header image courtesy of GITA. To view her Photographer Feature, go here.
Darla Himeles (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Flesh Enough (2017) and Cleave (forthcoming, 2021), both with Get Fresh Books. Darla is a poetry editor for Platform Review, and her poems can be read in recent or forthcoming issues of Lesbians are Miracles, Naugatuck River Review, Atticus Review, Off the Coast, and Talking River. She holds a PhD in English from Temple University, where she works as the assistant director of the Writing Center, and lives in Philadelphia with her wife and toddler. Tweet her @darlaida, or find her at darlahimelespoetry.com.
