Emanuella Israel

Starry Night

Foot pads descend

Beneath artful earth

the stairs underneath unsteady Timid, naked toes

Taking risks

As pulsating snails nibble the callouses.

Wet blades implore me to stay

Uplifted, upright

Each slip reminding me

Which reality I’m in.

Unsteady; unprepared

The trees are the rulers

that align my thinking

Upward.

The bracing air

sweeps through my chest and

my hearSt tops.

As my head rolls back

And confronts the firmament.

I can taste the ether

As it invades me

I am

both palms and roots

as my atoms become even more excited. The Peak.

The stars orbit me

And I can hear their laughter

As they dance closer and closer to Earth.

My laughter mixes in with theirs

when I realize that my eyes

are no longer my own.

Trembling fingertips

ghost up my cheek

to my ear-

making sure it’s still there.

Heat Signatures

I feel, as I walk

heat signatures.

There is no soul in sight.

Spirit is sinful,

subconscious substance smothered

by a mind gone numb.

Because who needs a brain

(or thoughts of their own) with a body like that

or that

or that.

Your make up will never be as good as the makeup you can buy.

A corpus of corpses

fragile forms

hollow as bone hits bone.

Synthetic smiles

begging to resemble the animated.