Helen Vitoria
(USA)
Soma
When no one is looking we float
the unwet body into a vat
We touch the body with rusted hands, caress its neck
feel its bones and sometimes they are singing
We can often mistake the body as beauty,
as a blue pool, as faltering water
When the body is dreaming
we say tremors
We try to control the body
only to find it is filled with shadows
When the body is struggling
we say the mind is playing dirty tricks
When the body leans into a twist, kneels to prayer
we anoint the body, we smear it with rose hips and fever
We say the body is alive with hair
an oval vessel
When the body is quivering, we think it is overcome with desire
a colossal instinct that is hollow
We see the bodies of women leaping
and think they may as well be dead
We say the body is sugar
we say it is a sweet dark animal
Originally appeared in Poets & Artists Magazine
In the Absence of Wings
One girl sits in the smallest chair at the smallest desk and catches rain that leaks from the ceiling on her tongue. One girl steals gestures from a wedding and pretends she is kissing a married man fifty different ways when she wakes up she finds that the man has rotted and floated downriver. One girl pretends the space around her neck is starlit, she runs her hands up and down and edge to edge and when she swallows the moon moves inside of her. One girl clothes herself in boys’ clothes and punctures herself with a key till she figures out how to lock the door each night. One girl watches the boys make a bomb of birds and leaves until they have left fifty birds without feathers.One girl hides in the thicket of the closet till her bones ripen to sleep and waits for winter to come. One girl is a liar & says she loved you for six long hours sometimes in more than one time zone. One girl swallows the sharpest edges of things till she can fill the space of his absence.
Originally appeared in Hobart
Rossignol
all night, relentless song―
a maddening rush
his little lamenting piercing number
that reminds me
I am still alive
soon there will be a loud
whistling crescendo
along with an impressive trill
filled with native woodnotes
some final masterpiece
of solitude
Originally appeared Blue Fifth Review
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BIO
Helen Vitoria’s work can be found in: Ping Pong Journal, The Awl, Rougarou, PANK, Pebble Lake Review, GRIST, Barn Owl Review and others. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets & the Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collection, Corn Exchange (Wild Chestnut Press, 2013) has been nominated for a 2014 IPPY Book Award and a 2014 Pinnacle Book Award. She edits THRUSH Poetry Journal & THRUSH Press.
Find her here: www.helenvitoria.com