Mela Blust: Poetry (Western Voices 2021)

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, and her second collection, They Found a Woman's Body, can be purchased through Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Mela is a contributing editor for Barren Magazine, and can be followed at https://twitter.com/melablust.

 

conjugal

 

glass love attached a stretched beside

should my bones rope through.

 

hope dangles a lick of hands;

you protest the landscape of my next heart.

 

how we climb the night's ribs for sustenance

tornado pried from the whisper of drowning.

 

out of every rose came a flood and that storm,

the ember of open mouths.

 

the god-shape behind lips.

 

 

oblivion

 

i know that i will not be remembered

by the vast expanse of stars

and will always feel small

beneath them

 

i know that i don't have

the answers

and even the questions i have

will echo behind me like dust

 

i will learn today find peace in the now

because tomorrow isn't promised

and yesterday exists

only in my mind

 

i will let go of the need

to not let go

i will walk forward

into the ever-changing horizon

 

i will not look back

into the magnets of your eyes 

and there will be no bridge to burn

because we never built one

 

 

 

song of the body

 

each black night i prayed to stars

housed in a body made of broken pieces 

i'm asking you for penance

but you are only made of glass.

what sort of prayer can your shattered rooms

offer my soul

made of sea and earth? 

 

where walls fail, i find a home built from trees 

that absorb my prayers 

where prayer fails, i am the mouse heart of man, scurrying for refuse

branches offer respite from the air of truth

but from truth sprouts resolve

a voice will find me, anger can be born a whisper

they always liked me to whisper.

 

maybe it is time to admit

that you sought my body out

for the way in which it made yours

visible 

maybe i can finally admit that i craved yours

for the way it made mine 

disappear.

---

Western Voices 2021 :: Setu, February 2021