Octopus flowers in the dark
I want to tell you
Yes, you
the man who was so briefly
in my life
that while you were in my life
that you were gifted
with an extraordinary mind
There's strength and risk
in my mirror,
power and dexterity
in yours
I can't
throw out
my feminine energies
with the past
nor with the pasta water
however much
I want to
I have to accept
you are no longer
in my life
that I was
so submissive to you
The river flows into me
I dream in English
of war
of Gaza
of the warts
on my hands
when I was a child
questioning everything
but my pain
remains in harmony, in synch
with my heart
the octopus
grows cold in the sea
somehow it found
its way into
the river
into my heart
I demanded it to stay
in the same way
I demanded
the man to stay
What does
a broken woman say
to the river
to the sea
to the octopus
but this
I am broken,
please fix me
Once I thought
I knew everything
I don't
That truth
doesn't hurt me anymore
It's Sunday
After church the family
has returned home
My mother
cuts up an apple
She eats it in
tiny bite-sized pieces
in the kitchen
The kitchen
is her paradise
My father is lying
on the bed
across from me
as sad music
falls all around us
like green apples
The world
is a cold place
when no one
loves you
when no one
wants you or desires you
in the way
they did when
you were
in your twenties
Older now
I write
in my journal
of emptiness
of futility
of sadness
She is old now,
they will say
She is depressed
Her arms
belong to Chopin
The leaf is Freud
The leaf is Gaza
and the sea
now is adopted
by these strange hands.
Solitude
The
suggestion of your face in my hands
held there
simply just held there
as the structure of the day folded itself
into me
its command centre
The silence elevates me
and it carries me through somehow
I think of us now as something deliberately
set in slow motion in the passage of time
You find yourself in another country now
surrounded by a sea of strange faces
strange bodies
strange women
(more confident than me)
that you call your friends now in your life
I must stop this
Stop writing to you in poems
This sadness in me
I write to it
Sadness in me
like a whole fruit or nut
except that nothing about this
fruit is nourishing
it's only strange
like the strange bodies in your life
like the strange women in your life
This sadness penetrates every cell in my body
this cage
this room
My father sleeps away the day
There is nothing I can do for him anymore
My mother sings
She sings a gospel tune in the kitchen
It fills the house
and then my broken heart
filled with grief
In case you didn't know this
I am grieving
for the day my father won't be here
Morning trees
My eyelids flutter
At night
I become a dark forest
my arms turn into branches
my hair into a valley
Grass finds me
and the sea fading to moonlight
I play Miki Matsubara’s Stay With Me
and close my eyes
as the walls close in
on my depression
and fear.
By Abigail George
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