Three Poems: The Crease of a Scar I Don’t Remember Making, Answers to Questions You Never Asked, Lost Memories of The Living, The Dreaming
by Kaitlyn Russo
The Crease of a Scar I Don’t Remember Making
The mathematics of winter was not held in a snowflake,
The mathematics of a snowflake was configured in my hands.
I carried winter in a knapsack. I scattered snow like breadcrumbs.
My weather swallowed the earth as ice fell from my fingers.
Each flake lost itself in the shape of another.
My hands hummed with a sudden blush, the bend of my fingers cupping the cold.
The wind held frost in the fold of its wings and let it go.
***
Answers to Questions You Never Asked
I said life is the end of a sentence
trying to punctuate without periods,
only commas and semicolons;
I said I tried to make one once, stitching
the dot into the fabric of my last word;
forgetting the knot, the mark unraveled;
I said my hands are flowers losing petals
to your touch; my fingers paste leaves
to the stem, confusing spit for glue;
I said the world, a room shut tight inside,
my face a wide plate, my eyes two teacups
turned on their side, my mind a spinning top;
I said a bearded lady in a music box,
white like noise, serpent teeth and horned feet
haunt me sleepless, smelling like pencil shavings;
I said white coats wander with pens like prods,
they poke and pull and fill my body blind,
pills like the quiet before the question;
***
Lost Memories of The Living, The Dreaming
Forget waking for water,
remember only the tall glass standing incomplete.
Not the meat chewed
only the apple core like a bruise browning.
Swallow seeds and garden grows
between your bones like teeth, Mother said.
I feel buds sprouting from every joint.
Forget the tree root,
only the rain, its windowpane,
my finger following down glass paths,
water pooling on edges
where touch cannot feel
cold running down a sharp surface.
Forget the dawn
rising, only light like red dust,
curtains blind to the touch.
Forget my eyes
burning like a filmstrip haunted
by fire, only blisters forming flesh,
teaching skin to feel nothing,
bone muscle, body brittle braille,
like fingerprints left behind.
–
Kaitlyn Russo is a nom de plume of a writer who grew up writing in Long Island, New York. She received her MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University, and she currently resides in Montana.
Photo by: Gessy Alvarez
