MORNINGS WITH SYLVIA

I’ve memorized how poppies dance in my blood every midnight,
Til I turn into a pale moonlight
A stasis in the night, cloudy eyelids shut

And then I rise like thin hairs on skin, cold breeze within
A dark house in my universe,
A paperweight head in dirty white sheets

The pain we share burns now in the eye of the emerging sun, flickering
Piercing my windows, hanging on my ceiling

I ingest sugar pills in the morning,
I ingest art, I ingest you
My favorite breakfast
The extracts from your left breast—
the white milk leftovers prepared before you left
I keep stirring, concocting my black coffee
And then I eat the crumbs of you
Transcendence occurs in my stomach
Oh, how you speak too much and too little!
Your words in turmoil, I taste
As the claws of letters hook my skin

I hear the birds sing your morning song,
a motherly poetry
I hold on to a red balloon, the strings of my twisted sanity
Then I lick the spilling ink of polarity
For I am like Lady Lazarus too
And only we know what happens between us two

A summoning, a ritual for the morning

A lemon bleeds now in the sky
Drips on my naked flesh, dazes my naked face
I burn, and then you
You burn and burn, til your coruscating soul shows
Your eternity, your perpetuity!

---

REMEMBERING SYLVIA PLATH ON HER 55TH DEATH ANNIVERSARY

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
—Sylvia Plath