poetry.

Phoenix

 

Her teeth sparked like crushed ember
The red wings spanned from dimple to dimple
Her face
A phoenix
Radiance only experienced through photographs aged like red wine
With words
Carved into Morse marks
Blue vessels course through lip crevices
Fitted ravines where my tongue wished to fill

I was never satisfied
With mere fingers intertwining two lovers
Like branches reaching towards the clouds to grip vapor
Like trying to catch light in the palm of my fist
And she
Was the nothingness that made my everything significant

Her voice
Sang songs of the island, long
The rhythm of the train tracked tunnels
Her lyrics the letters of the subway line
Her muse the panhandled violinist on the 3
That always asked for change
While everyone else told her to stay the same
But we painted in Flushing
In colors not yet existing
Between orange and purple majestic
She always put up walls where she went
Holding bucket concrete packed with lament
We splash debris into lakes
Filled with regret
As if to shake solid back into liquid state

And she, a jade jewel
A clear cut figurine of glass
Her smile danced in the sun
And her eyes wide would echo the weather around us

We wove dreaming into web fabric
Her hands were the keystroke
Coding into my chest
She held control,
Deleted my alternate self
I was never who I was
Because she made me who I am
A reflection

The moon
Which could never light up the night
But be a mere mirror of inferno
And she was a phoenix aflame
Wings in eyelashes batted
Her shoulder blades carried serrated edges
For every time
They tried to convince her that she was the sun
But she was just filled with fire
Where she walks
She burns
She doesn’t want to ascend with the rest of us
She wants to soar
A blazing effigy
Giving off light in ways the stars could never make the night sky glow
Like a candle under covers

They still said
That she needed to rise up
Start directions and days
Shining light which could only be seen in memories
It was her duty
To spread shine to grass meadows
Amplify dust in attic windows
Dry wet wear and wet pavement
Like burning hot was her profession
Through feathered tears down
Chiseled cheekbones
She confessed

Look, I’m just a firebird
Born from the ashes of my past
I never look back because I move too fast to even recognize it
We never stand still to watch flowers bloom anymore
I don’t cry because my tears give new life to birth grief
Keep cutting me down I’ll only dawn before the sun rises

Because that’s what she means to me
A crystal shining diamonds
Only worthless because I can’t put a price on true splendor
I look at her and wonder why we can only transpire in past tense
The life we live is never a gift
We don’t subsist in the present

And her always-changing fire flash intensity
When she flickers I glimmer gleam glossy
She is the flame beneath my feats
My greatness
My everlasting fervor for all things fixated on fact
We recognize fiction
And when we fabricate dreams into fruition
The world will know
That this supernova is not a star
But a phoenix ready to blaze.