Youth-Celina

Saturdays, girls pack in the showers
to scrape the hair from their pussies
amid the steam and evaporate into
the arms of eager boys. Those are
the high times.

Mondays, no mention. Yet:
sex on screen, sex anxiously hidden
in the inner coat pocket
of our language, sex prodded with
fingertip slips over a shoulder or
spine, as we flirt in the day. Sex-crumbs
stack day in and days out in public
lead to nights alone, feverishly
rubbing the day’s pressure away.

Crossing (Backwards)

As if the bridge’s presence is enough to spark the thought.
Summoning the meek and tired thirsting for an end.
In its usual green, suggesting numbers one can call.
Quietly adorned the entrance with the usual sign.
They erect a boastful bridge for functionality.

Healing-Celina

Your love is that of iodine
A curing clarity
That works its way between my bones
And nestles subtly.

Us-Celina

His sadness collects in solitude,
A silent hurricane over
A chunk of the sea

None had crossed but winds.
Mine, a desperate claw and grate
At open-chested earth.

Plopped on sit-and-squeak spring beds
With a couple loose words and
The death of a day,
We exchange miseries
Like rain sprawling toward
The earth, then climbing
Hazily back upward. Yet:

There is no nature here.

Urbanite-Celina

Toys in shadows, piercing eyes emerging
Through the narrow veins of city, we
Have always lived like this. The city is
Our concrete amazon to prowl unseen
in tangled chaos; nighttime mothers us
as we are children of the underworld.
The foreigners step quick, look past me while
I watch them hard. I watch them shamelessly
With nothing else to be but raw like dogs
That weave within our pack, but even dogs
Can understand their worth. She held me dirty,
Wired and eased me to my peak and fell with me
Beyond this world. She fed me mangoes bare
And coke from bottle bottoms, bagel crusts
And lugged my weight through subway stairwells, sought
A bed in wrapper-softened dumpster trunks.
Like pirates, conquering brick and grainy ships
Like castles from my infant dreams, my eyes
Are neither open nor do they resist
I sensed my vision tilted when she said—
Is that not how we are to them?—the rest,
The foreign city dwellers tramp our streets
But I just need to smell the putrid air
And know they’re leaving soon. I suck in all
The city sits in, splendor, terror, truth,
Until I’m bursting with my home’s torment
And blow the dandelions scattering hands.

Somewhere-Celina

This is my response to the Pick and Choose book "Endarkenment" by Jeffrey McDaniel, who I find to be an incredible poet. This style stood out from the rest of the poems in the book, as the lines were very short and there wasn't much fantastic description. However, it was still an extremely powerful poem. My poetry tends to be jam-packed with adjectives with long descriptive lines that ease into my point, so for this exercise I attempted to emulate the concise power that came across in "Guidebook to Nowhere." It was difficult for me to write a poem in plain-speak without many descriptors but I learned the power of more direct, simple language and I really enjoyed the outcome.

Guidebook to Nowhere
by Jeffrey McDaniel

I wear a patch
over my right eye.
Not because
it’s damaged.
I’m saving the eye
for a rainy day,
saving it from
all this crap.
One day I’ll
go to the desert,
and I’ll switch
the patch to my
left eye. And
I’ll only look
at cacti, and
butterflies, and
jackrabbits, but
never in the mirror
and never at
the sky, and like
this I’ll train
myself to see
the difference
between what’s real
and manmade.


Somewhere

I wore a patch
over my right eye
to waste the left
and seal the truth
for one of those
tongue-dead days
when no more
can be said
of this world.
I went to the desert
to be in the company
of still, living things
still living the way
I thought things
should. What I found
with my right eye
was blindness
just the same.

Sea Dance-Celina

Sea Dance

The sky’s a salmon slice that seeps to blue
And we are artists laughing bare-foot-drunk
A sympathetic cloak of ocean grew
They sky’s a salmon slice that seeps to blue
Our toes were kin in spilling painter’s brew
The more the canvas spoke the more we sunk
The sky’s a salmon slice that seeps to blue
And we are artists laughing bare-foot-drunk

Currently Titleless-Celina

The sky's a salmon slice that seeps to blue
And we are artists laughing bare-foot-drunk
Our toes were kin in spilling painter's brew

Jazz (in the Upper West Side)

Back bent and begging spirit of
The ivory-classic band of teeth
His mouth spits grunts like cries of love
Urging his hands to spray the keys
The audience is jaw-stuck struck
On Cecil Taylor’s furious mist
Leftright leftright, a surgeon’s muck:
His fingers and their insides twist
Applause brakes eagerly, palms pressed
A plea to be patched up again
The savage tones disquiet, infest
As musical might makes mice of men
The walls produce a stern “ahem”
And try to find balance again

Critical Response to "Come One Come All" by Alex-Celina

Alex, this is a very beautiful and intriguing poem. The language gives it the jumbled feel of a circus, yet meanwhile there’s a darkness looming over it. Very beautiful. As for some more technical things, the line “The men and women of the show did so much else than perform feats and tricks” could be worked on a little bit. It seems as though the line is more for moving along the story, than for lyrical aesthetics, however, it should contain both because I noticed it seeing as it is a major turning point in the poem. I realize this is hard considering the meter, but if you wanted to keep it a simple line, make the idea of revealing something about the performers even more simple and blunt, creating a haunting effect. I do however like the “feats and tricks”; I suggest you keep that in there.
I like how you take a subject so magical and fantastic and hit it with splashes of reality like the line “they would play the songs of home – of Spain, of Sweden, of Utah” and “Hidden from paying eyes, the people under the grease-paint and top-hats, stage lights, leotards and glitter, lived in trailers cracked with rust.” You play with an interesting idea by describing such a mystical place and bringing concrete and almost humorous light to the scene. The end lines “and whisper tunes in French and Gaelic over tinny sounds of mandolins and banjos under the deflated Big Top and ice-white moonlight” are magical and haunting, tying in all the different tones of the poem.

After-Thought (Ghost Life)

I’ve decided it’s my armpits
I miss most.
Or maybe that left ankle
that clicked incessantly.
The best of me
is toast.

Fried Plaintains-Celina

She knew that love had found her, shivering scared,
because clandestinely it seized her veins.
Like prodded clams, her heart’s brute clench holds tight.
Their sacred shields only held for so long,
Then gradually their case sighed broad and calm
Accepting bitter-sweet and watery fill.
She’s saturated with the stuff of jewels
Opened her waxy hill and trench of palm
To universe and particle alike.
Driven and fierce, her pearl sought out his ear.
The night he peeled and chopped and scattered bits
Popping and bubbly grease held his response;
From cast-iron, fried plantains were cooled and smiling.
They filled her nostrils with sweet-steam offerings
Presented like a delicate newborn.

Rest-Celina

Rest

Each night after work
the politician’s face rests
near a glass of teeth.

Ned Ludd-Celina

“Enough!” Ludd’s act organically
stewed engineers in shame.
Humanity mechanically
gasped with the stocking frame.

News-Celina

They danced and shot off fireworks
Feasted in their homes
A celebration of mourning, not a celebration
It’s a conscious awakening of an entire people

Feasted in their homes
Led away, wrists bound by wires
It’s a conscious awakening of an entire people
You don’t know what’s in our hearts

Led away, wrists bound by wires
Sprawling complex of golden-eaved temples
You don’t know what’s in our hearts
A boy who had a lovely smile

Sprawling complex of golden-eaved temples
Millions of trees harvested
A boy who had a lovely smile
Large manufacturers rely on them

Millions of trees harvested
The two countries are still interwined
Large manufacturers rely on them
Bridge a chasm in perception

The two countries are still interwined
Your fingers curl over just where they should
Bridge a chasm in perception
The billions of dollars that will flow

Your fingers curl over just where they should
A celebration of mourning, not a celebration
The billions of dollars that will flow
They danced and shot off fireworks

Awake, For Some Reason...-Celina

Response to “Waking Up Drunk” by Tony Barnstone from Sad Jazz

Waking Up Drunk

He wakes up drunk from ugly dreams. It's hot
outside and fifty flies have slipped in through
the door. He watches them whirl and corkscrew.
His stomach does the twist. With half a heart
he swats the busy air with a dry mop,
but they divide like water, then close in
again and pirouette and roll and spin.
So much for booze. It won't make his mind stop.
"My God this sucks," he slurs, and excavates
the mini fridge. Perhaps something in there
will make it better, coffee maybe, toast.
His mind does flips, but he grabs eggs and plates
and in the copper pan a dull face stares
at him from nether worlds, a thirsty ghost.

Awake, For Some Reason…

With what certainty do we so arrogantly
curse the rain? Sure, we must slosh and trudge
through trenches of wet apathy; while in his cove
a man writhes, wrung dry by the slurry
of last night’s drunken entropy. He is a creature
fashioned from the same atomic material
that made the obsessive fruit fly. The candied wildness
of a pregnant springtime. The forgiving showers
after a summer broil. “My God this sucks,” he belches,
and pops his white tongue off the roof of his mouth,
only to pause upon that particular taste,
familiar to when he would suck pennies as a boy.
So delicately does he pinch his trembling eyelids, as he notices
another man’s face, surrounded by flies.

Giraffe

A neck freckled more than most pulled toward me long enough,
And love coalesced all the more vulnerably and fruitful.

Borderless skies brewed with the sea’s body too mutual a gray.
Like chameleon doctrine: color reigned. I slipped even more from distinction.

Each soul needs judgment launched from stiff-stone, then truth-bruise.
More and more—upon your rocks impact—they cracked and built weight.

He whispered to me, “Celina, each giraffe-neck generation is longer than the last.”
Is then the lesson of trees to bear low fruit no more?