Three Poems by Emily Bilman

 

Intermezzo, a dream

 

The skyscraper built in translucent

blue glass was immersed

in Debussy’s sonata in G minor.

 

Comet-like others attired in black suits

trailed along the hall diffused in blue light

seeping in from the surreal windows.

 

A man in a blue checkered tweed suit

benevolent and conducive, led me

to the threshold of my new self-contained

 

home across the woollen carpeted hall

towards those “Flats of Transcendence”

designated by a western arrow.

 

The skyscraper built in translucent

blue glass was immersed

in Debussy’s sonata in G minor.

 

 

A reminiscence

 

Dressed in a marine

velvet dress of my own design

with a subdued gold trim on the collar

 

I stood in a house immersed

in the blue minor notes

of Debussy’s sonata in G

 

Where my husband negotiated

in a blue-checkered tweed suit

foreign trade with an austere

 

noble woman who had gifted us

a pewter pitcher – an alloy

of grey tin, copper, and antimony

the emblem of our trajectory.

 

The stages would be challenged

by the fermentation of silo-fodder

and milk, of a fathomless framed exile.

Antagonist

 

The beheaded male’s wings dry up

by the arid heat, the tense torso-engine curbed

by female spasms as she sucks the semen

into her eggs. Like the male mantis

 

on the angelica before the insemination

the accused is seized by an antagonist

as she interjects the virtual words into her mouth

in each trial conducted by the male bigot-

 

judges. Her life-force ceaselessly oozes out

of her as she is condemned to her untimely death.

Yet, the delayed decree of her martyred life

 

would always be enacted in front of our eyes

beyond the crime destroying her innocence

beyond the mantis-evil ending her maiden-life.

 

Emily Bilman, PhD is a poet-scholar who lives and writes Geneva, Switzerland. Her dissertation, The Psychodynamics of Poetry: Poetic Virtuality and Oedipal Sublimation in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry, with her poetry translations, was published by Lambert Academic in 2010 and Modern Ekphrasis in 2013 by Peter Lang, CH. Her poetry books, A Woman By A Well (2015), Resilience (2015), The Threshold of Broken Waters (2018), Apperception (2020), and The Undertow (2023) were all published by Troubador, UK. “The Tear-Catcher” won the first prize in depth poetry by The New York Literary Magazine and “Pathfinder” won the Polaris Trilogy Contest and will be sent to the moon’s south pole on a time capsule by NASA. Poems were published in Deronda Review, The London Magazine, San Antonio Review, The Wisconsin Review, Expanded Field, Poetics Research, The Blue Nib, Tipton Poetry Journal, North of Oxford Journal, Otherwise Engaged Magazine, Literary Heist, The High Window, Wild Court, Remington Review, Book of Matches, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Poets Live Anthology 4, OxMag, San Diego Poetry Anthology, Contemporary Poetry 2022, Ballast Journal, Soren Lit, Southern Arizona Press Anthologies, Poetry Salzburg Review.

She blogs on her website. http://www.emiliebilman.wix.com/emily-bilman