Michelle Greenblatt

Songs of Elemental Change.

I catch prayers attempting to penetrate the heavens, I kick over bits of interstellar dust, dislodge cinder blocks from the moldering walls of abandoned buildings. Binary code of the heart, heartsores & eyesongs, festering. How shall I greet thee then, Winter, after you have brought such destruction unto me? The songs of elemental change are silent now, all the time. I am the embodiment of neglect. This is what you’ve done to me:  my eyes are two moons:

they no longer reflect any light. 

In Between the Closed Parentheses.

When I walk through your perception, ashes fall around me. I breathe through a soft tube that runs through the pierced organs of all my failed poetry. Today marks three years since you petrified my kidneys. In the darkness, I handed you my heart, a voice—my voice?—says. Adamant. With my nails it draws the face of the cave. A circle of black takes shape in the shapeless blackness. In between the closed parentheses read: epochs, then, of summer, of Celan’s black milk, of clotted honey, of your hollowed out heart. Together we cultivated only snakes. Hollow me out a grave I will come home. Dawntime, the stars start to flicker & the evening languor distantly echoes the already-exhaled emptiness before dissipating into the (w)hole of the unknown. 

Hypothermic Silence

We weigh our grief by the gram and sell it accordingly. I paint the fulcrum horizon-colored, but it remains combustible. A hypothermic silence surrounds me. The sun erupts its reds, oranges, yellows…but here noise is cast in ice and is never heard. I see the stems of flowers twitch. I watch the hole in your head widen brazenly. Suddenly I’m running (am I awake?) too tender to let cry. Some universal cataclysm hangs over the heads of the valleys of dead men (women children). Here see my photograph? I traveled miles to bring this to you six and a half years ago and you shot me. I keep my smile in a locket around my neck so it won’t leave me again. My veins are loaded—yours? I am soft pinned against the red sky.

(pieces from this selection have previously appeared in 'Unlikely Stories')