Michelle Reale
Vector
I watched dilapidation encroach, believed in utopian thinking. It seemed to have worked for others. My own porous bones were no match for the yellowed linoleum, curling away from the corners that it used to fit into with perfection. The brindle cat, swollen with internal pockets of blood from blind outrage,the latest epidemic and without a cure. . The dog like a sentry at the back door, awaiting not arrival, but escape. Who belongs? Every day another improvisation: coffee, a light meal, a heavy sigh, the balled fist, the washing up. In the gloaming we slept cracked to crooked spine, twisting in the bedrock of someone else’s folktale. Your fingertip in my eye for the presence of tears in the dark, an ongoing deficit that enraged. Later, the cold bluish light of morning, like a ring of gas flame, extinguished my belvedere. Your lazy footsteps behind me, like you were tracking spoor. Predictably, and to your delight, I faltered. The strong, bitter coffee stewing in the glass, stovetop pot, became impatient. My gaze fixed at the medicinal sky, forever considered the threshold of forfeitures, blessed the smooth contours of silence that would allow me to get away with my life, one more time.
Michelle Reale is an Associate Professor at Arcadia University. She holds an MFA in poetry and is the author of five poetry collections. In 2017, Dancing Girl Press will release her chapbook The Marie Curie Sequence, and in 2018 Cervena Barva Press will release Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily. She maintains a website of writerly things at http://www.michellemessinareale.com/
Return to May 2017 Edition
I watched dilapidation encroach, believed in utopian thinking. It seemed to have worked for others. My own porous bones were no match for the yellowed linoleum, curling away from the corners that it used to fit into with perfection. The brindle cat, swollen with internal pockets of blood from blind outrage,the latest epidemic and without a cure. . The dog like a sentry at the back door, awaiting not arrival, but escape. Who belongs? Every day another improvisation: coffee, a light meal, a heavy sigh, the balled fist, the washing up. In the gloaming we slept cracked to crooked spine, twisting in the bedrock of someone else’s folktale. Your fingertip in my eye for the presence of tears in the dark, an ongoing deficit that enraged. Later, the cold bluish light of morning, like a ring of gas flame, extinguished my belvedere. Your lazy footsteps behind me, like you were tracking spoor. Predictably, and to your delight, I faltered. The strong, bitter coffee stewing in the glass, stovetop pot, became impatient. My gaze fixed at the medicinal sky, forever considered the threshold of forfeitures, blessed the smooth contours of silence that would allow me to get away with my life, one more time.
Michelle Reale is an Associate Professor at Arcadia University. She holds an MFA in poetry and is the author of five poetry collections. In 2017, Dancing Girl Press will release her chapbook The Marie Curie Sequence, and in 2018 Cervena Barva Press will release Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily. She maintains a website of writerly things at http://www.michellemessinareale.com/
Return to May 2017 Edition