wax

lydia host

a.     Again,

we pick our tortuous way

around the pebble patches, still

gouged in delicate wax, unhealing,

still pressed into our plastic brains

that this unfeeling sunlight yet

                             could be our god.

b.     Stirring

(you laugh) lilacs, sure,

No, neck and shoulders,

closer to the heart, place

a rusty spring outside, wait, the

happy scrap somewhere contains

a thin bright cord of metal

coiling like a wisp,

                                and gone.

c.     But then,

you say oneiric, I say,

Oneida. You say, silver,

I say, slaver. We could

go on like this all day,

                             you say.

d.     Well

plumping in the desert has

no lily hopes that ship

has sailed, under a cedar mast, that’s just

a poor denuded tree, with blanket.

e.     So let’s read, then,

from Norton Anthology, page

eight hundred and eighty,

under Leslie Marmon Silko,

about the world’s beginning.

f.      Alternatively,

the McDonald’s billboard,

(which comes to the same thing)

billions and billions served,

thus, and thus, and thus.

g.     Accounting

for differences in pressure

I think I died eight thousand

years ago, sad as I was when

my best friend fell into a peat bog,

as was fashionable in those days,

                                             you say.

h.     Maybe it’s hopeless,

and maybe it isn’t.

i.      So, why not call it

İstanbul, and lighten your step

to a trot, thinking of tulips

and six dozen brides

all posing for pictures

in Emirgân Park?

Lydia Host is a writer and poet born in 1994. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from: The Ravens Perch, The Woven Tale Press, Choeofpleirn Press, The Decadent Review, and Oyedrum magazine. In 2021 she won the First Prize for Fiction at the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage Festival.