Exclusive Poetry Feature: “I Have Been Yearning For a Safe Space in the Desert” by Alise Versella

Just me

…………..The Joshua trees

And the Milky Way (no light pollution)

No noise polluting the tramways of my brain

It all runs through me

Sets my nerves to cackling like crows atop birch trees

………………(I loved the birch trees in Maine

………………And the top of Cadillac Mountain

…………………………….. Just me

……………………………………………….The rock

…………………………………………………………………And the wind

………………………………………………………………………………………………….All the Atlantic around me

                                                                                                                               

Cold and brutal and sparkling in the sun speckled between the clouds—a toad hiccupping for a sky)

 

My heel struggling over cobblestone in Dublin, musicians on Grafton Street

St. Stephen’s Green holds me still

Holds me like you never did

 

I yearn for the ways in which a place loves me

Understanding what I mean in my silence

 

I am craving the retreating of the desert

Everything strands of time suspended

………………You have to look harder for the blooming

—really listen for the gurgle and the ripple

………………Like how lately I really have to listen hard to hear my heartbeat

 

My shoulders two boulders red in the sun

I need the truth of a desert being the last place you’d look for life

And yet here we are existing

 

…………….(I am a desert now)

…………………………….But you didn’t know the flowers bloom in the spring here too

—pollination happens amongst dust

 

I am learning how to shed the husk

Of the world and let nature do its

Living—I will live better to see the stars in all their light-absorbing glory

Perhaps the belt of Orion will cinch tight the waist of my worry

 

I will become one with a memory

Between the laundered sheets of time

Spaces free of concrete suffocating

…………….Plastic bag over the mouth of breathing

 

Sometimes I feel like I am suffocating within my own body

 

Oh for the empty

……………The archeological sand ready to petrify my bones

A fossil of my vertebrae

Oh for the desert to empty my lungs—fill the night of me with a moon for its stars

 

 

Alise Versella is a pushcart nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society whose work has been published widely. She is forthcoming in Crack The Spine and The Poeming Pigeon. Her latest poetry collection, When Wolves Become Birds,  is out now through Golden Dragonfly Press.  You can find her at www.aliseversella.com.

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