Raw

Tell me you’ve thought about it—
what it would be like to hold the sun.
Not just in your palms like rare fruit,
but something much more like embrace.
When I think of it I am taken to 19,
sitting on the swing chairs of my college,
embarrassed to admit I attended a zumba
class. I just went for a run. A lie as protection,
as held sun. What are you afraid will humiliate
you and why? Paola and I try and spot
burrowing owls at the park; it’s crowning!
she cries as one peeps out from his hole.
The crinkling hum of the electrical grids
above us a complement to the owl’s warning
yelps. Yes, I have been threatened in scream
before. Even worse—silence. Like a looming
blimp shrinking and stuffing my mouth.
Many times I have tried to reach into my throat,
throw its lump like a snowball at the miserable
wall. The room stays empty. On the bridge
at the nature center mangrove crabs attack
my ankles. Such is the tendency of the arthropod,
to skitter and strike. What are you afraid
to lash out on and why? Balls of cotton rub
against my nails to remove them of their polish.
To erase is to hold power. Chalk dust
on the floor. Our skins burnt and peeling.

WHEN YOU GOT IN THAT CAR ACCIDENT, WHAT?

“That’s the other thing—no one ever said that the light of heaven would come with an outline of silence. Lying on the road there, I could think of my mother’s voice but couldn’t hear her song. Red and white blobbed faintly above me, I became stuck in a lava lamp with the first man I ever loved. More than anything, I was interested in the melancholy of his gait. Eleanor said it was because my tears could ski down his sloped shoulders, I said it was bigger than that. From the beginning we were two wax bulbs moving towards each other in a translucent nothing. Don’t let yourself be nothing. You gotta steal the stuffed sloth sitting on the ice cream parlor’s counter and rip the plastic right off him, you know what I mean? I have this bad habit of weeping everywhere, there’s just so much. Sloths. Songs. Unnatural essentials like ski slopes. Even in the brief moment when I died, I cried. I knew they were screaming my name, BITTU BITTU, though nothing actually reached my ears. But I had to pretend. Because what else could I do?”

Carolene Kurien is a poet whose work has received support from MacDowell, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Key West Literary Seminar. Her poems have been published in Poetry London, Bennington Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. You can learn more at carolenekurien.com.