Sicily

Perfume poem thirteen, Sicily by D and G.

Originally published in Conscious, the zine, 2018.

Summer smells of Sicily
Soap and sand and soft focus lens
Glimpses of the world through sighing gauze
The languid light of lingering sun
Below the horizon but still kissing the sky
Clinging to the blue with lover's loathing of farewell

And to the air a flower opens
Its swelling sweetness tension in the dusk
A breath of life renewed with day's decline
Too gentle to compete with harshest heat
But counting down the rays till soft can shine

Perfect moment plucked from time
Like ripened fruit still warm to touch 
Awaiting what comes next 
While yet complete within itself
The stillness between two memories
Perhaps the strongest note of all

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Sonnet for blackbird

Originally published in Conscious, the zine, 2018. 

She furled her wings in gravity's embrace
And watched the blue horizons meld - no line
Between the sky and sea, one world erased
As water covers blackbird in its brine.
Surrounded by aquatic life she longs
To be a fish, because it's all she sees.
Forgetting flight, and wingbeats' subtle song,
She rides the surface, banned from swimming deeps.
Nor fish nor fowl, she struggles to relate 
To either them, or self, or life: a ghost.
She cannot see potential lost but hates
Her muted voice and salt-caked feathers most.
Facades decay and warp as they suppress;
The strongest parts will always manifest.
-Elena Nola

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When the deluge falls

It's been so long I've wondered
Would I even recognize the rain?
But the signs are unmistakable
And waken primal knowings.
Pores open up like plants
The scales of our hair sip moisture
And stand tall in attention
Our noses know the smell of rain
Ears can't unremember thunder
Our skin flinches with the electric shock
As lightning scalds the sky
The sucking void of warring winds
Winds the breath up in the chest
The tactile call and response
Between barometric change and body 
Forms precious proof that what's forgotten isn't gone
It's merely biding till the time
And when the deluge finally falls
You can't remember
That you did not remember
-Elena Nola

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900 nights

One hundred fifty nights ago
I counted the time between,
The week the star-tellers told me to;
The answer, then, was 750.
They warned me not to count again.
I should have listened,
Because now I know
900 nights have come and gone
Since last I felt the rain, 
And though I'm drowning in the numbers,
There is no water here.
-Elena Nola

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“Siren’s song in a bottle”

I am very pleased to announce that my poem “Siren’s Song in a Bottle” is included in the Summer Solstice 2021 edition of Eternal Haunted Summer. The issue is available now – go forth and read!

This poem is part of a trilogy I wrote from the perspective of a siren…what might have been the words to her song that were so irresistible? What secret longings in the hearts of men did she whisper from a spark into an inferno?

Or was she speaking with them in mind at all? Perhaps it was just the truth of her own soul that set their…um…passions ablaze.

What would a siren do if she had no voice but that of ink? Would her magic still work? Would it still lure in what is hers?

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From Time

PERFUME NO. 28, NARCISO RODRIGUEZ FOR HER (EDT)

From time to time I like to skip ahead
Into a life I don't yet live
Like picking up my journal
And reading pages bare of ink
Within the blankness there is everything
All possibilities contained therein
The things will be, the things that won't
The paths that I can't even see
Time is, by nature, nonlinear
Our form is all the limits us 
To clarity of hindsight
Some day a man will burn for me
Musk and flowers stoke the flames
I'll wear this then, to feed his fire
Today, to free myself from time
-Elena Nola

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Sonnet for an unnameable emotion

Far easier to say what it is not! 
It is not fear, nor apprehension bleak;
Anxiety is likewise term unsought;
Too negative those words all sound to speak.
Pain fills the gap between what is and what
Is wanted. I am open, free of need,
Held unattached to any outcome but
Still hopeful for the sprouting of the seed.
If staring at the edge of the unknown
Is standing on a cliff debating depth,
Uncertainty of fate I hold alone
As company to take that plunging step.
I feel as though I'm screaming without breath,
Embracing change as life, and stasis, death.
-Elena Nola

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Perhaps

I want to matter most to someone
She confessed
Shyly and a little sadly

All I could do was
Tell that lost little girl
Inside myself

You matter most to me
Perhaps, someday,
It will even be enough
-Elena Nola

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Come Down Loneliness Like a Friend

You never used to come alone
Your ways all mingled up with theirs
A wild, wicked trio, bad boys one and all
Loneliness, Abandonment, Despair

You’d crash in unannounced
And leave my house in shambles
You’d take and take and take
Take and never give
You’d take my time and steal my peace
Destroy hard-built contentment
Palm my hope and thief my joy
And leave me colorless and crying

I have learned to lock my doors
Against the ones would hurt me
As I have learned to keep an eye
On what my visitors encroach
Perhaps, you, too, have grown and changed
Cut ties with dark companions
Learned to knock and learned to go
When the hour grows too late

So come down, loneliness, like a friend
Bring news of what I’m missing
Put an arm around my shoulder
While you tell me where you’ve been
Help me remember how to yearn
And long for something more
Give knowledge for the time you take
Change nothing but awareness
And kiss me gently on the cheek
When soft you take your leave
-Elena Nola

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