Did you decide that winter
is your vanishing season?
That the frost is where you take your leave?
I have starved on less,
but you swore I wouldn’t be hungry
this January.
So, why do all my pockets have holes
and my heart vacates like a hotel room
after a weeklong conference?
So, why am I alone, holding hands
with memories and begging stars
to tell you
goodbye doesn’t mean forever?
Isabelle Palerma
This Movie Scene: a Poem
A poem built around an Evan’s Blue Song.
Within this shelter, your beating heart will be a bomb
(waiting to explode); instead of him, her, or me,
your rhetoric will be because of your enemy’s fractured heart
thudding inside their cracked rib cage.
You will have written yourself off as a casualty of this war
(a hostage of this situation), and
you will have sworn
there is no way to leave this war zone, unharmed, unscathed.
(Yet, somehow, you declare the scene a happily ever after ending.)
Your beating heart will demand fireworks (flashbangs with brilliant colors).
My heart has always begged for pyrotechnics
(as though it was crafted to create a show).
Cling to your memories, baby.
As the hours tick onward, you’ll be as distant as that far-off town you call home.
Release the demons you swallow because my memories are accessories, &
my heart is a hostage to the situation.
Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.
My cherished self-pity is the refrain to that song we knew all the lyrics to.
How insignificant is this movie scene to the overall effect of the montage.
How trivial.
& yet, it’s all we can think about for days.
This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home,
and we’re counting bits of broken glass as though they’re stars.
We’ve made our bed, and now we must lie in it.
Even as the broken glass cuts, leaving behind scars – hopeless reminders of rainy nights and car crashes.
Your memories constellate at this exact moment in time (where time stops having any meaning whatsoever).
I have to ask.
How can you bear witness to what you saw & still manage to crack a smile, darling?
Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear all these years later like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.
Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.
Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear
after all these years
like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.
Your beautiful energy is hemorrahging,
losing consciousness with each passing minute.
My cherished self-pity is a memoir that fell in the rain. Warped all the pages. Ink is left smudged.
Cling to your memories.
This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home.
You’re a distant, far-off city.
We’ll stick to singing melodies of a song we all know.
No cherished self-pity in the refrain.
I’ll continue to remind you of graveyards & ancient tombstones,
of fire escapes, &
of long-abandoned lecture halls,
quiet libraries
like a ghost.
We will sing melodies of a song
we all know the refrain to,
yet no one picks at karaoke nights.
I will remind you of graveyards &
ancient tombstones,
of fire escapes,
of long-abandoned lecture halls
like a ghost.
Your beautiful energy is evaporating now. We have made our bed, as they say, now, we must lie in it.
How insignificant is this movie scene.
Isabelle Palerma
with a little help from the boys at Evan’s Blue for some inspiration when I was struggling with a block.
Funeral: a Poem
Housed within my ribs
is a metronome that on a good day,
glistens like a cluster of amethyst,
but most days, it burns
like an arsonist’s proudest achievement.
It is an anatomical feature
I thought I disposed of
when sitting on fire escapes,
waiting for lovers to save me from the clutches
of my own sins & sorrows.
But she wrapped some grass around my obituary
and smoked it.
The vapors felt like my soul parting from my body,
but you did not say goodbye.
That day,
you made love to my ghost while a part of me watched.
That’s the shame of dying –
no one knows where we are
& I exited the room silently.
Isabelle Palerma
Memories: a Poem
Forgive me.
Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.
Nostalgia lies close to my skeleton bones,
and yet my past is clouded
like a mirror with its shine worn off.
Whenever I try to recall the small details of you,
it’s like gazing at a blurry photograph taken
many years ago
of someone I once loved.
& remembering your voice,
though I could listen to it the rest of my days,
is like hearing a phonograph underwater.
The way it falters in my mind
as though you have a stammer,
though I know you never stuttered.
It’s my mind that creates the gaps.
Memories are a wound &
I must carry them.
As I carry them, the past becomes less certain
and I wonder if my memories are true
or perhaps just something I wrote down
in a book.
Storytellers don’t always make the most reliable narrators,
but even through the gauzy haze,
our memories glimmer with a whispering beauty.
Isabelle Palerma
An Excerpt from my WIP
Hey y’all,
Long time no updates. So, while I’m still working on GP, I’m also working on a few other projects – a chapbook and a couple of novels. One is a dark fantasy novel; the other of them is dystopian sci-fi.
I thought some of you might be interested in seeing an excerpt from it while I continue to work on my other projects.
I need to see you. It’s urgent. The words shimmer before dissolving into an array of scintillating pixels and vanish from my screen. As I yank my starched lab coat off and tug my scuffed-up leather jacket on, my thoughts splinter between the contents of the message and its sender, my best friend, Nahia Winters.
Meet at my place? I text back, scrunching up my eyebrows.
As the laboratory doors slide open, the chatter of my colleagues escalates, echoing against the linoleum. Most of them are headed to a downtown zone-out café. Some hipster joint with the hottest headsets, most up-to-date Dream technology, and most recently uploaded dreams.
After a fourteen-hour stint at the lab, I don’t blame them, but the word “urgent” buzzes through my veins like a stimulant. It makes the concept of rest impossible. Anyway, Nahia’s a Tier-1A Dreamer. Worst case scenario, she can lend me a headset and upload a dream for me.
“You coming, Simon?” Jonathan calls, glancing over his shoulder at me.
I wave him on, flashing him a small but genuine smile. “Got some personal stuff I’m dealing with,” I admit, “but thanks, anyway, bro.”
He nods. “Sure thing.”
I watch as he catches up to the rest of the group, grateful he doesn’t ask any follow-up questions.
A ping as Nahia reply comes through. I’m already there. Our texts glimmer: individual letters become dancing dots, then disappear before sending me back to my home screen. All evidence of our exchange disintegrates rapidly. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I shake my head in disbelief. “How does she have access to my phone?” I mutter, rolling my eyes. She’s the Dreamer, and I’m the scientist, and I can’t operate basic tech like she does.
Shit. It occurs to me. Nahia might be in trouble. I sprint out of the sterile space and hurry to the Aeroline station. Once I am at the station, I gnaw on my lower lip, contemplating how to ask Nahia if she’s in trouble without rousing suspicion of the monitors.
I loathe the monitors. They’re the ones who capture the outspoken ones.
I’m certain they’ll capture everyone who speaks out against the Regime one of these days – the way they surveil our phones and emails and now, how they check the Dreamers’ dream content for any signs of unrest or revolutionary thought.
Focus, Simon, I remind myself as I slide into the seat and flash my pass at the scanner. My heart begins to hammer in my chest as it dawns on me that Nahia’s probably already in trouble with the monitors if she’s showing up at my apartment during peak Dreamer hours. So, as we begin our ascent through the clouds, I start scheming.
Interested in reading more? Let me know! I’m always looking for more readers.
Isabelle Palerma 