Mela Blust (Western Voices 2020)

Exclusive: Western Voices, 2020: Edited by Scott Thomas Outlar

Bio: Mela Blust is a Pushcart Prize and three time Best of the Net nominee, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander, Rust+Moth, The Nassau Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, Coffin Bell, Collective Unrest, and many more. Her debut poetry collection, Skeleton Parade, is available with Apep Publications. Mela is a contributing editor for Barren Magazine and can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.

beware the tempest

this gin addled night

how one set of words

can crack the dawn

any soul still clutching

a lowball glass

knows the rust growing over

these ventricle windows

the hands of the clock

their own gentle tombstone

the ochre of your skin was home

until

it wasn’t

siren song 

lure you with breadcrumb hips and

star stung eyes

into my damp forest,

ripe with siren's song

descended from ancient bloodlines

soft cottontail fur and

disturbed earth

where thin slivers of desire

fold in and over on themselves

to become the knife of my lust

where sinew joins with bone and

smashes itself against similar softness

where diamond eyes

are mirrors

and limbs twist into snakes

and then, only then do i decide

whether i am predator

or prey

sanguine

  

i am not        together

shovel, bone, and tree

these are the components

of the          roughness

that is       me.

i cannot make     promises

i am moon and she is me

this is all the   beauty

of not knowing

        who i'll be

tomorrow when you kiss me

i'll be demon         or be doll

your arms still feel like    home

i am sanguine

 even as i        fall.

Setu, April 2020