Hallucinations
I recognize you
know something I don’t. Best I can do,
raise my finger to my cheek. Gesture
my knowing for an ignorant lens. In this vision
you are the canary in the coalmine. You
bellow and teal but
no one will listen. Drop
dead demands the doctor, you’re just
hormonal.
Grant me your visions: permit
my eyes each become
two birds. Name one bird reality
the other truth. The re-
double. Each eye is the paper
sparrow and her empty
page. Both the cutout
and the cut out.
I recognize you
as I peer through
the opening. We ghost and winnow
to see. Fog the camera lens with our
breath. Be as mystic and curse. You know
something they will never
understand and
I know you
as well as I could
know a body through
its stillwarm form
mussed into cotton.
Erotisme
Arms like a lover’s embrace
X, kiss
my unsunned skin, my dreams are
sugarspun and satin. Unravel
and sigh as silk ribbon smooth
and lush as cream. Watch me,
I say to my lover, and become a bird
fly until our tangled
bodies blip
into knot, just a textile, just a snag—
X—snake’s death squeeze, gradual
as forgetting, tenuous as complicity, a corset
tightening over your chest, mine, ours.
Here, the possessive pronoun implies a body
possessed. Here lies the lover out of frame,
the ghost, the neither of us, the both.
The snake consumes its tail—likewise I devour
every photo of you as ravenously as I consider
my face in the steamed mirror, test the stretch
of my eyelid, cheek, hook my finger in my lower lip
try and peel myself, skin off an orange, to recall
the unbruised fruit of me, the sugar, my
once crystalline belonging.
I have always been the person I am today. Always
standing in the desert
body shaking in time with the snake’s
rattle. I understand the necessity of softening.
Behind the camera, you are vaguely aware of instructions:
Do not fight. Do not be conscious of relaxing
your toes, then ankles, calves, thighs core
shoulders neck fingers. Smile. Be
pliant as a stunned mouse. Be
palatable. Be easy
to swallow.
Appel
You look towards the sky, eyes gleam plead
bellow. I offer earnestly. Willow myself, blush
as you, say love is only as lush as a lover is
diligent. I have been building affection
concentrically, consistent as honeycomb,
been the bowerbird assembling the nest
somewhere below my breast-
bone, been weaving a basket
as a place to roost.
I recognize you as I do
my reflection in running
water. Recognize you as lone-
some, as hungry. So
accustomed to spurn, you hold
your stomach close to
your spine, wait to opine
the flash.
Face the camera: Appel, meaning appeal,
tenuous call, blister and cry. Appel meaning, we will not
sit silently by while man doctor politician feeds
the memory of each of us to his sharpened shears
seeks erasure’s ease and surety.
Appel meaning halfway through
the cutting, I become you and you
become a flock
of small yellow birds
then you, all of you, alight in a tree,
chitter and sing, you are
sunshine as the black smoke of a storm
amasses on the horizon.
EMELIA KAMADULSKI is a writer and artist currently based in southwestern Virginia. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Tech. Her work is concerned with deconstructing psycho-medical distortions, unleashing animals, and conjuring benevolent ghosts. Her poem “[this film is a montage of bears eating]” won the 2024 Poetry Society of Virginia Prize and appears on Poets.org.
