Friday, July 25, 2014

Fireflies and Hex, both by Cecilia Woloch

Fireflies
by Cecilia Woloch

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn't hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who've wronged me—for bitterness—
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toy-like mice
whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

'Fireflies' by Cecilia Woloch, from "Carpathia".
 
 
 

---------------------------------------------

HEX
By Cecilia Woloch

I shut that black wing from my heart. That bad bad bird.
I slam the light. Wrong love, it flaps, wrong love.
I slit the curtains of my eyes. If one more death makes room for one more death, I’ve died enough.
I’ve died in rooms that bird screeched through, the blood-tipped feathers in my hands. The years of longing in its craw. The little claws like dangling hooks that ruined my nakedness for good.
Wrong love, it flaps, wrong love. I wave my arms to make it go.
As if the sky could take it back.
As if my heart, that box of shadows, could be locked against itself.

----------------------------------------------------

Because I wanted to, that's why. 
 
xo,
Marion
 
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"Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" ~William Butler Yeats




 

3 comments:

erin said...

she bends me back to a different kind of poetry i've not been spending much time with. it's interesting, fresh, wild.

xo
erin

Kelly said...

Oh, wow! I can just imagine all the stories and poems that could come out of that house!

Marion said...

Erin, yes to wild. She's new to me so I'm still licking her lollipop-poems, tasting slowly. xo

Kelly, me too. I'd love to live there for a while. xo