Saturday, July 30, 2011

Three Poems

Charades
-for Odin

With a fast swipe of her hand,
she pushes everything off the counter.
The messy bottle of ketchup
that has never done anything but harm,
a container of stained shirts;
the napkins with their weak,
onion-thin consolations;
the plates that serve,
like frozen hands,
the bitterest food.
She watches as it all
crashes and mixes to the floor
into a pattern of disaster
she can identify.
Skin and bone shards
swimming in blood.
The moaning of shattered bodies.
The floor’s silence. 



By Valentina Cano, Entry 8


A Hopeful Morning

Sandbags seem to block my view.
I struggle to part
the tan bundles,
pushing the churn of grains,
but nothing shifts.
With a pull,
I slice into them.
My hand is covered in
seeds that will never bloom,
in pieces of stuffing
that will never fill anything again.
I let out a scream,
like opening a gate,
horses made of anger and fear
pouring out to maim
with hooves of sound.
I raise a handful of spilled sand.
Let it twist to the sky once,
then slam it down
to the tiles with a crunch.


By Valentina Cano, Entry 9


Canned Lies

If you’d known it would happen,
if you’d realized the future undoing,
like unwinding a watch,
like skinning an apple,
would you still have said it?
Would your words have trickled
out through straws of laughter
to bloom like frozen flowers?
Probably.
You’d have allowed the sweat
to spring free
from your boiling flesh, to
plunge
to cooler terrains.
You’d still have made a knot
of your lies
and thrown them up,
overhead,
to flirt with a room
that was a snip of sitcom.
One covered in colored sugar,
secrets tucked liked
napkins under sofa cushions.

By Valentina Cano, Entry 10