She is a distracting creature, with her pellucid body
like glass that peels back its own skin to allow
the curious voyeur to set himself on fire inside
her sacred temple. She has no need for clothing, either
as the orb that floats ever before me and invites me to touch
or as the translucent nymph walking next to me. Little
spirits, delicate membranes of rainbow and shimmer,
slide across her skin; every once and then
as I turn to speak to her, I see one of these Divine promises
slide over her nose, an eyelid, or a cheek.
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Category Archives: Prompt Poems
Beware of Poets Bearing Gifts
Helen stands alone, drenched
in the ink of midnight punctuated by a few faint stars
and a proud, brittle moon sitting as the
unveiled and defiant queen of this landscape. A black
and unknown bard emerges from behind a fragile veil
of shadows: she almost recognizes his face,
a carved brown rock monument of deep lines and curves,
from the page of a book she’d read in high school. You will
need this to see and hear, he says as he
reaches a long bronze arm above his head
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Epistle to Nicole
Dear Nicole: I might come to you as a
prayer, wrapped up in silk. Your best and brightest
hopes wax like unbidden moonlight
in my belly as magic that can quench the fires
that singe skin, heart, and soul – for we were
meant to burn, but not to immolate ourselves
with anguish. I might raise my hands to the sky,
trying to heal broken temples stone by stone,
bone by bone, and relight the lamps inside of them
that have been bled dry of oil and whose flames
have long since died. I might come to you as a
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Debutante Emily Looks for Buried Treasure
They lived on Seventeenth. The Negro
steel mill workers, these new men recruited
by ashen-coated promises of gold moved into
these little one-story brick boxes with their
families: and Helen’s was no different. Helen
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Liftoff
The heels of Helen’s feet –
smooth brown apples in the sun
gravid with forbidden knowledge –
do not need wings. Humans are not
supposed to fly, but she will. She just
doesn’t know it yet. She’s running
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Helen R. Jones
Helen R. Jones watches the sun
crawl up the back of the sky. He smears a
trail of persimmon, gold, and cinnabar on
its sacroiliac; a small strip of lapis lazuli skin
peeks out at the world just above its waistline. She
has seen this happen at least sixteen thousand,
seven hundred and fifty times, give or take a
week or two’s worth of the missing the occasion.
Home
Tree, reach a bold, electric violet-white arm,
an arm scraped bare of skin, up to heaven! Let
your lithe limbs sing bioluminescent
against a thick pallu of sky which is
woven at dusk and studded with a single moonstone.
Let your nude body shine like a tall-shouldered ghost,
pallid and hungry for stars and souls – and all the while,
dear sycamore, curl your stiff, skinless fingers
around a few inches of evening silk and pull;
reveal the scandalous shoulder that Ratri hides
from the eye of daylight!
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