Guarascio

Melt

/ Katrina Kaye / Leave a comment

…that this too solid flesh would melt…

Melt, flesh, melt…

Starve cheeks gaunt.
Count vertebrae poking through
an elephant’s ridged back.

Stretch skin around pile of sticks.
Drape clothes on hanger hipbones.

When arms wrap around frame
say how they go right through,
corporeal diminished to ghost.

Melt, flesh, melt…

Let skin prickle with shiver,
bones clink like wind chimes.

Skirt fingers upon skeleton
exposed through dorsal skin.
Body’s topography foreign
under well terrained fingers.

It’s not about sexy anymore.
Not sure it ever was.

Hard to remember the initial
skipped meal of childhood,
running until knees gave to collapse,
the earliest mirror reflection that spat back.

It seems it was always this way.
Hold backbone together
with thin layers of spit and glue.
Skull bobbles on shoulder blades.

Freshman summer of thirteenth year,
a week’s worth of consumption added
to water and orange juice.

On the seventh day,
stomach heaves with the rot of bile.

At nineteen, diet consists of
coffee, ephedrine, cigarettes.

There are no more curves
to define woman over creature.
Feminine forfeits to stick figure
and it isn’t enough.

Melt, flesh, melt…

Keep count.
Constant comparisons:
measurements, lists, graphs,
charting roads which lead to bone yard.

Slip into winter’s shade.
Shortened days make it easy to hide,
stay veiled in the dim.
There is comfort in the buried.

Secure behind barricade,
confined to bed,
no longer know hunger
or hear telephone.
Locked from the inside,
they take the hinges off the door.

Melt, flesh, melt…
Flee this corpse for better.

All I ever wanted,
all I ever wanted,

all I ever wanted,

was

skin

and bones.

“Melt” is previously published in the collection, my verse…, published by Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC in 2012 and Light as a Feather; an anthology of resilience (2019).

Touch

/ Katrina Kaye / Leave a comment

Katrina Kaye

I.

Though I have not
felt his hands,
I imagine them cold,
like my grandmother’s.

Paper thin skin loose
over rounded veins,
Ice to the touch,
gentle as baby powder.

II.

My hands are always cold,
an untreatable
hereditary condition.
My grandmother shared my fate,
hands turning
from white to blue,
numb until the pain
when the blood flows again.
Always cold.

III.

Their hands are misshapen.
This grayed man
with his large paws
and patient one toothed grin.

He rubs his hands
together, stoking
a fire that has long
abandoned his veins.

Her yellowed fingernails,
a mangled band aid.
It is dirty, old,
it needs to be removed,
the cut revealed.

Expose water winkled flesh.

I imagine her hands
must be warm,
like her temper,
nails sharp as her tongue.

Two lovers mixing
to a temperate balance
lasting over 68 years.

IV.

He shares
the patience and stillness.

He touches her skin,
as her hands drop.
They are gray and they are blue.
They are cold.

“Touch” is previously published in Rabbits for Luck (2016).

The Painter

/ Katrina Kaye / 5 Comments

Katrina Kaye

He wanted to be a painter.

He wanted to paint himself at sixteen,
standing tall on mountain top,
a golden warrior for the helpless,
a beast of burden ready to sacrifice
for tomorrow’s promises.
That’s how he saw himself
when he closed clouding eyes.

Always careful to refuse limitations.

He was ambivalent to skin rubbed raw,
the formation of blisters on hardened heels,
and the weight strapped upon back leaving
marks against white freckled skin.

It took finely sliced transparencies
to etch out the idea that this perception
was self imposed.

Petrified on haunches, he watched
as the reverberation between the hum
drum of reality and the fleeting images of
fancy fabrication left him weak.

The last attempt he made at reclaiming his identity
came in a self portrait:

sprawling crow’s feet and age spots,
so close to his mother’s angry mood
he doesn’t recognize the expression on lips.

A child swallowed inside rib cage
who has been screaming for years.
A man who can’t recognize
lead poisoning seeping into tongue.

He still wants to paint a portrait of life,
a portrayal of desperation and disappointment,
capture howl in brush stroke and oil base,

display the hollow of gut
in strangled sketch and charcoal dust,
portray innocence, youth, freedom
in the colors on canvas.

But the paints have dried,
hardening bristles to stone.
He is merely a man,
too tired to rekindle the
spark long ago abandoned.

He once believed he
could be something magnificent.

“The Painter” is previously published in The Fall of a Sparrow (2014).