ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Alexa Lemoine is an artist based in Orlando, Florida. She has work appearing or forthcoming in The Blood Orange Review, The Harvard Advocate, and Atticus Review, among others. She currently edits poetry for Burrow Press.
On The Last Day Of April
today the air is drenched in honey. blueberries line my pockets only to multiply, leave stains, & tumble free. it is for their own good. my nose will soon outpace the rest of my body; all this growing is a minor fee to witness everything that stays still. a mango separates from its bone by afternoon. my heart is sprouting with wheat in the heat, or useless americana, or pain, or a mountain of both. all of this is to teach me to be better at love. if i don’t do this the flowers will never bloom again in the place i most long to be. the problem isn’t with love but with how the land eventually reclaims the things i hold dear. there’s nothing left to fit in my tiny mouth, nothing more i can tinge with saliva & claim as mine. i’ve already sucked on too much. if i grew up to be simple i’d still have a chance at happiness, like heraclitus cataloguing small pleasures. the sun stains another freckle on me, a book i once understood falls from its permanence. there is a flood of uncontrollable desire by nighttime.
& what precious radiance, what blood of earth, what with the ramshackle of it all, with my selfish skin. by midnight, what doesn’t belong to me becomes so lush. what doesn’t belong to me is only as lush as i’ll allow.
Learning to cope with the absurdity — and beauty — that encompasses human existence has been the hardest lesson to learn as I move out of my girlhood. There’s a contradiction in so many things: how easy it is to love someone that isn’t right for you, how the body desires salt at the height of thirst, that in thinking you never want to forget the best moments in your life you are both living and making a memory of that living.
In this poem, I inject my favorite things, fruit, flashes of cinema, and a sense of mundane divinity. Not only is April my birth month, but also the liminal pocket of time between the cold of winter and the heat of summer, a temperate zone that embodies a fleeting sense of safety in a world that is anything but static. It’s in these spaces where we’re allowed to shed and grow.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
