Content Warning: violence, death
Amaleena Damlé – Two Poems
Demeter’s daughter
at night I hear your howl
it ricochets across oceans
your body cleaved in two
like the chasm that separates worlds
you let me slip away
whom you’ve always held near
clasped too tightly at times
it wasn’t always so
now you howl at our distance
but I remember
the stillness the silence
the hospital verandah
your body seized and shuddering
and somewhere somewhere
a baby crying
my crimson seahorse
silent hitchhiker
spiralled in ribbon and blush
still in a porcelain bowl
Amaleena Damlé is a poet and an academic literary critic, who lives in Durham. She writes scholarly and creative pieces about bodies and beings, and has poems in After…, Atrium, Dreich, Dust, IceFloe Press, The French Literary Review and Sarasvati. Twitter: @AmaleenaDamle
Artwork: Lethe by Giuseppina Brandi
Giuseppina Brandi lives in Naples, Italy. She has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literatures. With a great passion for poetry too, she believes in the power of art and poetry of healing and connect. Autodidact, she has always loved drawing and painting and she takes inspiration from natural world and human emotions. Her artwork has been published in Black Bough Poetry edition Sound and Vision, Acropolis Journal: Issue Seven, Blue Motel Rooms Poetry and Art inspired by Joni Mitchell, The Poetica Sisterhood of Sylvia & Anne, Cover art of the Spellbinder literary Magazine Autumn issue 2023.