Poetry Suite by Scherezade Siobhan
“dusk’s mussed-up sheaves curl for hours into the straw-plaited bylanes
of our old neighborhood.”
Poetry by Scherezade Siobhan
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Oscuridad
for J
i
You speak about growing the most arduous orchids -
vanilla-fonts in a cuneiform of shamrock green,
their pale spellings columned in heather-snow.
The solstice drags out your harvest’s gold, their pixie tongues
lighting the room where we are unbarred in the ghost
- swans of nag champa smoke, sigils bodied in squid ink.
Your hands abled by mire, my mouth :
an arc of fathomless alizarin.
You promise every forbiddance - the secour of each lovesick
incongruity drawing us out from an abundance of syruped messes.
You lower your boughs into this cockled spate; new flickers
of spoon oars grazing the surface of a loosened pond.
I cauterize your name - summer’s first flames limping through
cyclamens and mallow, a mirage tucked under thunder and fire.
A grapevine of holly blue ready to sip their cup from my
apollo’s horn. You tilt your head towards this dark earth,
watch each seed slowly gush to its own tender spawning.
ii
consciousness // erose // in its untold wharf
& the way its eigengrau buoys
the scarceness of everything
i can’t pry to a pearl -
give it an opportunity for missing,
for abridgement that will construe
the tongue into a tremored sanguinity
this forbidden emphasis, mirador tolling
the venise ravel of comber. i fail
to assimilate into this usable hollow
this nocturnal torrent
fluent in every version of the glissade
i, of mantis-green riverfonts
i, of abeyant boats
whose body stretches
from this dark into another
like a name hyphenated by the echo
of its own returning wave
iii
no one comes home when the night is exonerated
in the gimmicks of barred owls.
through a paradox of dole & throe, he must be taught
how to revisit the mink-coy slink of my skin
divorced from the premonitions of a boy yoked
to a bull’s eye // the godly falconry of his hands
the way in which he still starves the motives of his bones
as if a new season will venerate the ropeswell of his vines
inside the polysemy of rain. will chew up the blue spruce of every
mountain’s breath. will comply with the algorithms of absences.
he unsettles the sheets as if the act of moving is measurement
for the best tense we can stitch ourselves into - his fiction
contrived into earthly madnesses. leaving hoofprints to sear
the locus of every numb lake. the water breaking open
its welcome asking us - go. unlearn again.
iv
body as a-stone-in-throat, an earthwound
so alluvial, the eskhara was dressed
back to its corporeal settlings.
you - in your arsenal - robin egg blue,
chimerical neptune, berry-pith.
depression blue. shark blue.
blue as the rue-veined tinder
of this murder season’s breakthrough.
tongue nooked, naked - outblooming
the taunting bones of its corral.
mijo, you must first learn
the colours in their musk’d garra.
shoal the mouth with verd or lila or grana.
sting seasalt into the sun’s rose & gourd.
gallo rojo still raying the streets,
mouth thinned songwards -
leaving the last of its music
to a marriage of light & silt.
eskhara : ancient greek – hearth (origin of the word “scar” especially in context to “scar tissue”.)
verd/lila/grana – green/lilac/red in Spanish.
gallo rojo – a popular Spanish song
v
dear leaf of god, i am your weather of limerence, of fogs
ribbed in mollusk-stencils. the sleep of a flower mantis
costumed in an orchid-trap. empiric organ, blissful gluttony.
a strand of dew to milden this settling of mummery.
bare me to your horned tang, its untenable calando.
the mandible snapping out from its own gushing cave.
in us, the bourne of a thing, its perpetual outwardness. your
lineament mortised to my roost. your tendrils all snow-n-gunpowder,
every tuft, each tallow - crimson narcotic, routes of red-winged dandelion.
give me my promised cleaving : the primrose & its winding serpent.
our bodies & their sundered economies, subtle forgeries. the way you
say zahara - mouth still white-gold from the heat of your own seed.
how the ache must travel from shin to knuckle.
how darling the way i lope & muddle in your lucid direction
vi
last night, my father came back as a boatman’s aubade
slinking its feet in a lily-jeweled monastery for new minnows .
his voice tenderly harrowing the abeyance of an opaque dream,
the water quartered to a four-way dialogue of broken chords.
in a courtyard of plantains, the ghost always reifies itself
in the shape of two peacocks; one perched atop the other;
twin beds of spooked bijou; each preen handwritten in phthalo blue.
dusk’s mussed-up sheaves curl for hours into the straw-plaited bylanes
of our old neighborhood. its winter inviolable under the amnesty of
incense oil & coal-hazed bakeries. its foreign voices tearing up
the riverside in a babel of muscle & pining. in its numbing depths
my father’s body flattening its voluted hibiscus - a flowering tea,
memory convulsing
its red seeds into the carnal soil. the skylarks hovering over
the embankment in a rearrangement of astrology charts.
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Header image courtesy of Erik Mack. To view more of his work, go here.
Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo-Rroma Jungian social scientist, community catalyst, and hack scribbler. She is the author of a chapbook, Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015) , a full-length poetry collection, Father, Husband, (Salopress UK), and a poetry pamphlet,”to dhikr, i” (Pyramid Editions, forthcoming). She is the creator and curator of The Mira Project, a global dialogue on women’s mental health, gendered violence, and street harassment. She can be found squeeing about militant bunnies, here, or @ zaharaesque on twitter/fb/ig.