LE Francis – Two Poems
Apollo
It is like a sunset. It is the moment when the sky gives up its heart.
It is ordinary & then it is purple, it is orange, it is as pink as the inside
of a throat. & it doesn’t stay away — static, distant, untouchable —
it runs into everything else. The light is not dying it is transmuted,
it turns the mountains iridescent, it fills the river with threads of silver,
& everything is beautiful for that moment. Then cold will rush in,
it will shock my lungs, & the words simmering there will cool, it will feel
as if I should confess for hours with the smell of the river & woodsmoke
clinging to my hair. & in the fleeting seconds that follow, I will become
beautiful, as part of a beautiful world & it is all because of you. You are
a sunset. I watch & listen & I am changed. & I should thank you
but the sun sets & the vision fades & all I can feel is cold & distance
& the hard angles of a dream that is neither a seduction nor a nightmare.
& I may not love you yet but I love the world because of you & when the sun
sets it reminds me of you & all the doorways you’ve haunted over the years
& I wonder what doors I have yet to step through
& if you’ll be there? Or if you have already gone?
Is our moment already over? Your colors mellowing
in the throat of the river, the singing summer swallowing
how beautiful you were when you turned & walked away.
Poet laureate of the stellar nursery
Don't tell me there is nothing left of it. No signal
of sound or color, no specific measure to be discerned
of how close I came on that night. Gravity humming through
my body, irrevocably pulling me toward absolute abandon.
The wreckage of my atoms hardly noticed as they gave
their hearts away, one by one, protons plucked like strings,
I would have let it all flutter away if he would have asked.
& if the stars sing the songs of dread gods unseen into the vacuum
of space; & if the stars are a throat for the forces that push & pull
& seam us into the molecules of our bodies; & if all that is rings
with that resonance, with the movements of worlds that died long
before I ever blinked my eyes & saw him there, there must be something
that remembers that night, something tangible, a force clawing through
the guts of the universe, taking notes of the completely unremarkable
moments of my human life. See, I was too busy remembering how
to speak to memorize the color of his eyes or how his hand held
his drink. & now I regret my focus, my heart already light years away,
convincing constellations to reorder, to make something of the feeling
I'd caught & frantically tried to release as soon as it felt as if it could start
to hurt. Hope is a knife in the throat & if I said I wouldn't say a word
about it again despite whatever pain may come – I would be lying,
but what I wouldn't give to read it sure in the stars, to feel it in the pull
that holds me to this world, more magical than I dared to believe.
What I wouldn't give to know somewhere I still exist, buzzed
& fidgeting under the table – caught by the warmth of his eyes.
LE Francis (she/her) is a writer, visual artist, & musician living in the pacific northwest. She is a former arts journalist & the current managing editor of Sage Cigarettes Magazine. She is a staff writer & illustrator for Cream Scene Carnival. She is a co-host & editor of the Ghost in the Magazine podcast. Find her online at nocturnical.com.
Artwork: Blue Sphere by Wendy Hess
Wendy Hess is from Berkeley California, USA. As an Artist, Photographer and Author, she enjoys the Gothic, Classic, Humorous, Magic, and Bizarre side of Life. Her work has been featured in Cauldron Anthology, Seaborne, Floresta, Acropolis Journal, Lavender Bones, Nymph Magazine, and Disability In Fairytales And Folklore.