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?
new poem
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 have written yourself off as a casualty of this war
(a hostage of this situation), and you swear
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 demands 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, and 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, as they say, and now we must lie in it.
Even as the broken glass scratches, leaving 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, and of long-abandoned lecture halls, and 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 and ancient tombstones,
fire escapes, and 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
Unlike You: a Poem
“Unlike you . . .” a prompt from Kay A.
In less than a month,
unlike you to care about the wreckage of the Titanic that is my heart.
I have witnessed you stampede on
and trample me barefoot.
Yet,
the teeth you bared is what
I have come to expect.
Family taught me
(for better or worse)
to murder with mercy.
When you were flashing your baby teeth,
sharpening like knives,
I was practicing my smiles
in polished glass.
Unlike you to offer condolences
or express empathy,
and yet, the past few days,
while Lazarus has been in the tomb,
a different side of you has been exposed.
Unlike you to show warmth,
still a reptilian cold underneath,
but the air is a bit milder now – less frost,
less chill.
Unlike you to offer benevolence and yet,
a crack of a smile,
a beginnings of generosity.
Is it possible you were murdered by my mercy?
Killed by my kindness?
Or did New Year’s resolutions just fall
a few days behind on this calendar?
I’m not one to gaze the gift horse
in the mouth,
but I do have my suspicions
when you were flashing those fangs,
honing them like knives,
and are now sweet as spun sugar.
Just call me Doubting Thomas
if your kindness only lasts as long as
Lazarus was in the tomb.
Isabelle Palerma
A Cage for Your Heart, the Softness of Sadness, and the Gentle Lull of Love: a Poem
An architect constructed you a mansion
for your heart and you called it a cage.
He crafted each room with so much caution
and care.
The muscle nestled between your ribs
felt like a boulder I was incapable of swallowing,
I am a myth,
tugging on strings that have strangled me.
My fantasies were polished glass shards
shattered by laments and heartbreak.
Ancestors draped mirrors
with black organza in bereavement
after a loved one died.
The fabric is as light as a ghost,
so tell me,
how did I still I wake up with
bits of glass crunching beneath my feet?
The sadness was a fragile creature –
the weight of black organza –
and yet I am a myth,
desiring nothing more than to pull
the strings that choke me.
But it’s gentle sometimes,
sneaking in like a moth,
as soft as a ballerina’s skin
and barbed wire.
Our wires danced across the dance floor,
and if you watch,
we might just choke on the memory,
the softness of sadness, and
the gentle lull of love.
Isabelle Palerma 