The Life of a Grape
A glass cloud is your new mask:
Inhaling the sweet fumes
you drift, sailing on sweet melting
laughing intoxicated loving
the surreptitious grip of bodies glued together
tethered to lover’s language,
the kinetic threat to snap the string at any second;
Fingers confusing hair and skulls meeting,
your eyes two suns, blooming, alive,
a hum now lies in the palms of your brain’s edges
where lazuli speaks;
A slow trembling licks your coils – a caveat
that you carry on fingertips through every door;
You suck on it;
Like the skin of a grape
ruptured it spreads liquid secret fire
filling every crevice until even your legs
open to it.
Then biting bitters spat
from the boundaries of teeth you snap back –
The glass introduces a pane of spider webs
you put your lips against
just to make them bleed –
You spill, and a similar hand to home slaps
the cheek you just kissed –
A fetus floats dead in the canyons between you,
a bell jar sucking each Sunday morning memory in,
amber fingernails of aggression and every other relative
corroding your skin until even breath is bile
like empty weight.
Knees melting and meeting the ground,
warm remorse sighing from spaces between
tender tumbling of whispers,
pooling of feathered breath on your neck,
cocooning in the web of past words
spattered like tapestries on the wall,
You transform: together,
meeting at the edge of the moon,
sinking into liquid musings,
eyes open to each other under water, understanding,
the gentle sting between you binding your bodily babble
now with tighter tethers and softer blends.
The cloud enfolds you again,
thicker, sweeter, silver
Escaping Contained Plexopathy
Outside this saying
fiction unweights but
I have nothing to say
at all
All these:
echoes of happenstance released,
offerings to the emptiness after –
Selah! to the True Author –
Where that wailing eagle sings
reminding my passion, waking.
What is this capacity
newfound in silence?
Both eyes closed to see
with the other
widening rings,
I drink
This reflection, the love
inside love
the deep light
without beauty within,
A resurrection
and hazy melting
Tender and fragile
and nearly blank
The sky my spirit circles in –
Formless and infinite
Voyeur
I fall in love
for sixty-seven
Seconds at a time:
Smile choirs filling
the gap like umbrellas
swooshed inside out
Azure eyes cradling
the sea inside a skull
hovering in the corner
The spillage of lip’s
isthmus over the edge
of ruby fired clay
Hands like stars
proudly protruding
from weathered wrists
Laughs mimicking
melodies appealing
to the angelic
Sharp shoulders sheltering
the spears and flames
of love’s artillery
All these bodies
possessed by light
a part of me apart from me.
What does it mean to fascinate
so easily, to hypnotize
even the trees?
—
Chelsea studied Art History and Classics at UVA and graduated in 2012. She currently divides her time and interest between the controlled chaos of two restaurant jobs, reading Buddhist philosophy and other fiction with tinges of Neopsychedelia, freelance writing for Cville Weekly, experimenting with oil and water color painting, participating in a work study at Bikram Yoga Charlottesville, and experiencing liberation of spirit through music, hula hooping and dancing. She considers herself a lover of the arts and an advocate for healthy, beautiful lifestyle full of laughter, happiness, and expression.
