Sweet (and other poems)By Melinda Giordano
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Sweet
I share my home with a sleek phantom;
Her feral profile with gleaming mouth haunting its rooms,
And the badlands of carpets
With pupils dilated,
Crowding out the green perimeters
And all domestic mercies.
Subtle and dangerous,
She lies coiled at the edge of my bed,
Staring at my hands
As if they were birds.
Her purrs are a stealthy enigma;
I hear them flutter in her ribcage like butterflies,
Echoing across the bones.
Looking out my window
She is Bastet: callous and gilded,
With gold dangling from her ears,
Who surveys her deserts,
And crouches in hieroglyphs and tombs:
With fur that is sweet
With the embalmer’s herbs.
Dusk
I saw the twilight lower like a dusky eyelid
Soft and cosmetic
A mix of spilled powders and rouge:
Of lavender shadow
And plum-flavored lipstick.
I saw the marine layer descend,
Rippling with rain and currents;
A gray ether fragrant with salt and brine:
The harpooned breath of whales,
And the submerged pelagic worlds.
But the barbaric summer’s parasitic wildfires,
Dissolved the sky’s pretensions
Of cherry and auburn shadows
Into a soft chaos.
Like an alchemist’s coin,
Minted in his boiling alembic,
The sun hung like a blistered watch.
Waiting, until it was to be consumed,
By the perfumed evening
And all its subtle upheavals.
I share my home with a sleek phantom;
Her feral profile with gleaming mouth haunting its rooms,
And the badlands of carpets
With pupils dilated,
Crowding out the green perimeters
And all domestic mercies.
Subtle and dangerous,
She lies coiled at the edge of my bed,
Staring at my hands
As if they were birds.
Her purrs are a stealthy enigma;
I hear them flutter in her ribcage like butterflies,
Echoing across the bones.
Looking out my window
She is Bastet: callous and gilded,
With gold dangling from her ears,
Who surveys her deserts,
And crouches in hieroglyphs and tombs:
With fur that is sweet
With the embalmer’s herbs.
Dusk
I saw the twilight lower like a dusky eyelid
Soft and cosmetic
A mix of spilled powders and rouge:
Of lavender shadow
And plum-flavored lipstick.
I saw the marine layer descend,
Rippling with rain and currents;
A gray ether fragrant with salt and brine:
The harpooned breath of whales,
And the submerged pelagic worlds.
But the barbaric summer’s parasitic wildfires,
Dissolved the sky’s pretensions
Of cherry and auburn shadows
Into a soft chaos.
Like an alchemist’s coin,
Minted in his boiling alembic,
The sun hung like a blistered watch.
Waiting, until it was to be consumed,
By the perfumed evening
And all its subtle upheavals.
Melinda Giordano is a native of Los Angeles, California. Her written pieces have appeared in the Lake Effect Magazine, Scheherazade’s Bequest, Whisperings, Vine Leaves Literary Journal and The Rabbit Hole among others. She was also poetry contributor to CalamitiesPress.com with her own column, ‘I Wandered and Listened’ and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing speculates on the possibility of remarkable things – the secret lives of the natural world.