Anchored
Posted by Melissa Pavri | Filed under Poetry, Print
If miles were alive he would tell me to run. To get lost in my own breath and never look back. He would say you with the anchored eyes there is blue beyond the silkscreen of a life you hide behind. I would say I have tried to cup the ocean in my hands but a tempest told me I could not keep her. Told me the eye of the storm does not tire and the wind will bend you if you forget your arms are sails. I once thought my stomach was a compass. Believed in the finite of direction and the salt in my skin. Thought they would guide me home or at least to a place I had been. But this maiden voyage has rocked the boat of my being. I know myself like a mermaid knows earth. Like a fish knows flight. I know that the ocean promises nothing but holds everything. Something like a heart. If I could I would wear the seabed on the palm of my hand but sometimes it is better to get lost for awhile. Better to believe in journey than in treasure. In the pearl of possibility that sits on our tongues and begs us not to swallow. The rush of realism can only make you silent if you do not fight it. I am lucky. I know that friends are like currents and sometimes you have to let them carry you.
Wreckage
Posted by Melissa Pavri | Filed under Poetry, Print
The nearness of you is marble on sky. Enchanting and breakable. I do not know how to sleep without the obsidian clouds that travel your gaze. They look like a mouth of dream that likes to mull over the ocean. Big fish and little noise. Everything that washes over our bellies in the youngest hours of the afternoon. You listen. Like the conch of my lips can tell you the all the answers and the sand will not write them down. We drift for the damnation of not knowing when the world will end. What its silkscreen will look like against the wall of morning. You know that waves are fickle and only the shore will care about you when the sun wakes up. But we both like moments. How they surf the crests of our noses like a breath in a flame. Sometimes you are a compass on the tip of blast and I want to be your Magellan. Follow you into the storm of your self and remind you of the peace beneath the city. I want to tell you our season is graying. The trees are bending their spines to tell us we are flightless birds we do not know our feathers. I might live a dozen lifetimes in the wristwatch of this week. The face of time will silver and laugh no more. I might get another tattoo and you might cut your hair. I hate the way I need to wake to you how innocent its bones look at dusk. I will unfeel the summer in your skin and tell the sun to know the nape of your neck like I did. My poems will not wait for me. Reason will be a wrecking ball of fist and we will be the falling house no one cares to fight for. You know there is no axiom for the way it happens. How unsettling it is to fall in fear with a moment that is seven leagues away. But you cannot know it until it comes said the silence. Its skeleton will crumble between your fingers and you will wonder how flesh wanders. Like a mind on mushrooms. It is unthinkable. Though I suppose we are too. I can map our voyages but I cannot imagine the distance. Cannot measure its ache in thought. Will it unfold by the fathom one night in July and paddle through a few thousand miles to tell its story to a sea of strangers. Will it thrash like a beached dolphin or sit on a bed of memory. I will have to wish on the wreckage.
Djembe
Posted by Melissa Pavri | Filed under Poetry, Print
Whenever I hear a djembe laugh with the pulse of a thousand fingers
I think of what it means to be free in a world that stares at every open mouth
Like a field on fire
Worried its blaze might burn sanity to the ground
I want to brush the sand of insecurity from my neck
Roll down the dune of my stomach
And tell the pit of my navel that I am alive
Throw myself into the busied river of the day and
Fish for nothing but a night in a place you don’t know exists
But you know you are on your way and
There is gravity there and it is more important than reason
In this beat I am nothing but release
A moment resting in the humid air
Just for the sake of breathing the life from shaking hips before it bursts
Today I am a dying drum and I want to be beaten
With the weight of an afternoon awash with tangerine sun
And heads cocked back in orgasm for no other reason than that they know how
I want to arch my back into a question mark and admit that I am not all knowing
And that the music knows this space better than I do
But I can try
I can open every crevice of me to shake the dust from my pages and
Laugh at the most jealous of instruments
Because they will never bend their bodies for joy
Like we do though many will die trying
Their lips are selfish old women
Never let their thighs do the talking
But we know better
We know the stories in our bones can only be heard
When our skins cry loose like rattlesnakes looking for more interesting lives
When our shadows shed their shame and jump over our heads
To catch us before we lose our legs
I want to know my shoulders will trust the sky more than the earth
Sway like artists toward the stars and promise nothing
But belief in flight in seconds in ecstasy
In the bareback truth that the most beautiful things crack on the outside
If only to let the rhythms of the world into their veins
Even if for only a dance a moment a breath
The truth is my chestnut body owes its heat to the earth
To the soils in my grandmothers eyes and
The plains of her back and all I want to do
Is run thoughtless through the strands of her onyx hair
To the poetry of the djembe she held for years like a last word before expiring
The slap slap racket of life struck on the hoop of her mouth
Was always enough to make her forget the dismal face of boredom
Let the reddened soles of my feet leave the ground
Long enough to learn the secrets of escape
Allergy
Posted by Melissa Pavri | Filed under Poetry, Print
i think your skin is
born of bumblebees
not the kind that sting
the kind that comb
elbow through mess just to prove that
something can come of chaos
hover hum between flailing and dying
and find honey in the wingspan
of the air between our noses
it baffles me
how a swarm of laughter can silence
every qualm my hands have ever had
how the cacophony of your breath
can drum my thoughts into
the hexagon of your smile
i wish i understood the allergy of distance
the cloud caught truth
that you cant outgrow giants
or mothers scorn
or six hours airborne
wish i could ease with will
the hive that swells lip and flesh
to the knot of stories in our knees
that cant seem to come undone
the ones that fret like fire and
slither like steam
through the thicket of today
they are the seed of you
make my tongue sound spring
and lose the lisp of winter
why is it that women must be linguists
i pray they forget how to spell
long enough to learn the names
of the boys in their back pockets
