Grief Flower
Lie flat in the dim, wait for sleep, feel
grief stem from your sternum, unfurl
great dark petals like the biggest magnolia
you’ve ever seen, in negative, but
the size and heft of a banana flower, invert
as if gravity were in reverse, or as if
your back were pressed to soft ceiling,
the pendulum bloom extending the color
purple so deep it reads even in daylight
as black. Think no fruit will ring this stalk?
Perhaps the monster bud’s more like
an artichoke: you know it’s done when
a thick leaf can be pulled away. Run it
between your foreteeth for sustenance.
67 Words After Humberto Ak’abal
The edge of darkness doesn’t
cut gashes unless
you’re looking
down from space, seeing
a whole Earth, outside
atmosphere, full dark
yourself: “lights out!” click
the only glow a blue marble or
our Moon, reflecting our
singular star. Really, though,
here on the ground, I’ve sat
stopped at a red light, seen
full sun beaming all blocks ahead,
while here——glance left, right——stays dark,
another world.
As a Daughter of Fathers, Yes
plural, what can I tell you? See
the vein of fear or weakness or feeling
(any emotion, on face, feminine)
that threads through every stone——
a line the sculptor (male, of course,
did you expect otherwise?) follows.
Tap, and what is not figure falls away as
grit and gravel snow the ground. Those
tools (figure, ground) the artist (man)
wields. But perhaps you step gingerly
into that room not your own, crunch
cast off marble underfoot, take note.
The flaw One Art is built around. The way
shoulders hunch protective for so long
they round permanently: wings at rest
hiding what is soft, beating its scared
animal heart. The way we have always
sat around a small fire surrounded by
cold, each one of us a digit, a finger or
a thumb (oh, is that the man in this
metaphor? Short and stocky?) slightly
curled, our fingerprint faces toward the
ember in palm, bodies turned to light.
Diana Aehegma grew up on the Big Island of Hawaii, and lives in Oakland, CA. She earned her MA and MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she won the Ann Fields Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Prism Review, Monday Night, the Tinfish Press anthology Jack London is Dead, The Press at CSU Fresno anthology Shadowed: Unheard Voices, and the Featherboard Writing Series / Aggregate Space Gallery chapbook Crossing Paths, among other venues. Diana’s current favorite revenge story is Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus (queens Hera & Persephone/Kore…ok, & Hades, mere steps behind <3 ).
