Five Poems by Jorge López Llorente

 

Drowning Girl


After Roy Lichtenstein

A typical gasp. 

The reverb of a dampened cry, perhaps just 
a whisper to the blank sky unseen above: 
I'd rather sink… With hair coloured Klein bluish; 
with hushed open lips not finished yet, folded in 
ruby origami, closed off from the ocean's 
expanse; with closed eyes, nervous fingers. 
An unfelt wreckage, 
an "I don't care!", 
but just look, look at such pretty loss. 

The pain is out of the frame; 
the melodrama is in full view. 
Typically, a gasp is due. 

Another soap opera, the very picture of loss, a sea 
of troubles foams before our eyes: thick-lined tear pearls 
like aspirins dissolving as they drop, 
not quite bubbly, about to be stirred, 
gulped down and washed away, 
in a stylized pulpy fiction 
on a blue cushion of sleekly painted, suspended despair 
for one to gape at, before moving on 
to the next passion, 
the next item. 

A strained sigh still echoes, though. 

But she does sink, and there was no Brad, 
no drama, no throb. 
Just beauty, 
left alone. 
All alone. 
(Sigh!) 

 

 

Your Dream

 

I am your Dream. I am the glint of night, 
a murky ripple when, snared, you slip 
from a daylit skin and breath and sight 
into another. Wherever you trip 

I’ll linger – don’t flinch. Where those loving limbs 
– warm and capable – sweat, forgetful cold 
can’t dry the linen, where your head now swims.  
I’ll steal back chapped lips, calls unheard, on hold. 

‘Before’ or ‘now’ mean nothing.  
                                                           Worry it’s lost? 
Not in me, burning through closed eyes. Whim hits 
you, as my sparks drift together. The cost? 
Just melt into me… Remember. Flesh’s heat 
joins dream; claim that gone body, relive ghosts. 
Own it: your want, your past, is now my treat. 

 

 

Your Body

 

That body I knew tingles within me, 
pulsing through my nerve endings and bloodstream, 
while I stiffen, thinking “it cannot be…”, 
flushed with hot impulse, but reined in, it seems. 

This face of mine will still clearly be him 
in the mirror, cross-armed, though jittery; 
still self-possessed, despite the eyes’ red rim. 
But I’m a mere shadow with a body 

suddenly possessed by cold sweat, reflexes, 
until you feel “it’s there, take it for granted.” 
So before you think, so automatic, 

you reach for that hand, so sympathetic, 
but there’s nothing beside you, which perplexes 
one’s brain: I catch myself rethinking, daunted. 

 

 

Carfax

 

Streets intertwine in the afternoon breeze, 
to the rhythm of a scruffy man’s guitar, 
as he shakes off broken songs, symphonies 
laced with long twangs and angst’s puffs of cigar. 

The spires beyond want to dream, but no peace, 
no pause, no rest, even in quiet hours, far 
from hustle, tourist herds, students’ rushed whiz, 
can stay. Only the tower’s stones disbar 

the hectic churn, having seen sweat and grease 
of drunken fight, library sighs, loud cars. 
The crossroads’ devil spirit will just cease 
when the tower’s echoed chime with it spars: 

magisterial hoarse clang, at which time freezes, 
while the church gargoyles gaze, yore’s avatars, 
stone-eyed, at grit below, history’s pieces, 
while the clock face gapes – a firm unclosed scar. 

 

 

Recycle bin

 

Erratic daydreams drip into your mind’s eye, 
as it slips into sight by accident, when you’re alone, unseen. 
It’s a pointless image, posted late one night, 
jammed, but splintered in your memory. 
It juts out, it throbs there still, cold, in the silent screen 
– half-recognition in a flash. 

There, somewhere, that face must still flicker, move on, flash; 
that look, now pixelated, now with crisp eyes, 
might shuffle along subway crowds, engrossed in a screen, 
in the same station as you, answering a call, walking past unseen 
amid a blur of waists, bags, shoulders, memories 
that no dream oozed yet, that the past hadn’t yet leaked at night. 

Just another metro face, like petals on a wet black night’s 
false nostalgia, hazy – though the numb look can flash 
back to (ex-)friends, (ex-)colleagues, (ex-)relatives, an ex-memory: 
kisses that once held their breath, names that lived, stares that grazed those eyes. 
It’s half-forgotten, almost left unseen 
if fate had not summoned some buried photo to a screen, 

And now the undead figure surfaced in your screen. 
(Thomas or Laura? Which one? Met on what night?) 
How many marriages, accidents, pets, lives hide unseen, 
inscrutable, behind the blink and camera flash 
that left red pixels in their blank eyes? 
How many potential shared memories 

rot, left behind? Void hope for smiles or tears, lost memories, 
only for algorithmic slideshows or ‘suggested contacts’ on-screen 
to recall. Flying mosquito-like, those glazed eyes 
keep coming and biting, day or night, 
a kaleidoscope of eyes that bend and flash, 
better if unfeeling, unseen. 

Void regret for what can’t be unseen, 
as if programmed in deep dream of memory 
– detached faces stuck to the mind in a flash 
that get under your skin. Nothing screens 
you from the tangle of what-ifs, in spider-webs of sleepless nights, 
tripping over… which faces glued to which touch with which words in whose eyes? 

But it is just empty eyes on a screen. 
The blind memories that happen to flash 
at night are what is better left unseen.

Jorge López Llorente is a bilingual writer and translator from Madrid (Spain), who studied English Literature at the University of Oxford. His debut poetry collection, 'Los ojos desdibujados', is out with Cuadranta. His other poetry and fiction appeared in magazines like Under the Radar, New Critique, Wildfire Words, The Citron Review and Vagabond City, as well as on Spain’s National Radio (RNE).