Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

January 18, 2021

cropped-headersmaller-1.png

en temps de peste

Since March 16th

  • poetry
  • journals
  • guides
  • fiction
    • The Valour of Quinn McFoule
  • interviews
  • art
  • about us
  • donate
  • submit
  • contact
  • poetry
  • journals
  • guides
  • fiction
    • The Valour of Quinn McFoule
  • interviews
  • art
  • about us
  • donate
  • submit
  • contact

Three Prose Poems

  • May 20, 2020
  • 1:51 pm
  • Texas
After the bomb your body becomes bunker to pandaemonium. Your heart a nuclear winter.
1

LeeAnn Olivier

If you enjoy this piece, please consider a small donation. You can find the link to the author’s personal Venmo/PayPal profile (or a donation fund of their choice) in the byline below.

Photo by Nathan Lemons

 

 

Invasive Species

After the bomb your body becomes bunker to pandaemonium. Your heart a nuclear winter. You heave open your ribs’ hull. Creatures clamor in, cramped and chittering. Fur and tooth. Squirm and blight. Your couplings little holocausts. They eat you out, healer turns monster. Bright spinal knurls spatter against the wall, a Pollock painting. Your gut a panoply, devil’s knot. Nest of snakes, Medusa-wound. Medea-mad. You name yourself Aftermath.

 


 

Quarantania, I

Night calls unbreakable wild girls and beasts, spooky green-screen graffiti, a resurrection. I love the white moon circles and purple halos, dogs going prophet, paradise-blue heartbeat raining alien music, orchestras and choruses. I whistle essential shots in the dark when the fog of the riverbank rises like a holy ghost and April evenings come with no memory. Then night moves like a flower, all daisy face and fairy blossom. Or a star. There is a kind of power in that, a testimony, a witnessing. Spring storms grizzle the high mother planet. We decide what’s sacred. We don’t have to be here. Plush wild dogs wrap tiny truths, adrift on a wide unpunctuated sea, asterisks and little barnacles, bottomless apothecaries. This dis-ease is a black art, its jazzed badlands wading and flawed. Every secret I tell makes telling the next one easier, the forest still drips albatross guts and hope clawed as hunger. Buddha said in this life we look for our fingerprints from our other lives, risk diving full hell. In Hindu mythology Kali is the goddess of time and change, of power and destruction. She could easily I think be the goddess of now. Brooklyn streets are slick and wet, the pavement disappearing under iridescent puddles, the sky closing in. It begins.

 


 

Quarantania, II

Violent love drugs knuckle the peeled world in an intimate alien cinema, you and I housebound sea dwellers stuck virtually searching: uncrowded beaches, witch hunts, tattoos, manslaughter. Once we drove South all night, past a brothel called the Moonlite, to taste Memphis pure wildflower honey, its beekeepers hanging green manuscripts to smoke out the queen in a wild forest exodus. (In a dream I wrote this poem: Apocalypse Camp at the Dawn of the Great Extinction.) Spellbound on a doom loop wonderland, we stumbled further South to Fontainebleau Beach, guzzling sea salt chards, black krill, opalescent swirls in pigments pomegranate, only darker, like a plague of unsolved femicides. White nighthawks silvered the most remote ocean, its helium escape valve a bauble star ring as perpetual light became shadow, and I knew then I’d be yours forever.

 


 

LeeAnn Olivier
LeeAnn Olivier, M.F.A., teaches English and Humanities at a community college in Texas. Her poetry and short stories have most recently appeared in Sonic Boom, Parhelion, The Hunger, and Driftwood Press. She currently lives in Texas with her partner Nathan and a menagerie of teens and rescued animals.

Help IH and our writers: share this piece!

Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
PrevPrevious“The Six of Us Pack Pretty Much Alone”: DIY Food Relief With the Cattail Cooks
NextThe Joys of Social Distancing: An Introvert in IsolationNext

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

siteitcon
  • about us
  • donate
  • submit
  • contact
Menu
  • about us
  • donate
  • submit
  • contact
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Send us your quotes here.

©Infection House 2020