Lourdes Veronica

Sorry

Sorry
for losing you through no fault but my own.
For being an awry river dwelling elsewhere
but the strawberry bank of your body.
Shir hashirim:
I am rabid with adders of your vermillion absence
missing you not kissing you
darling you coming you
lightning you.
I am bluer and the bluest.
Dear emptiness of your name:
you came to be my bride
and kissed me up and down the night
kissed me away, kissed me through
all the risky hues
of red—
and now it’s through
me that you’re gone
and there’s no talking
to the whirling dervish of sorrow.
What angel shaped my mornings
after your breasts?
How I would pray to gods of sunshine
on the journey towards the magma chambers of your pleasure.
My double lava.
I wander on air
in a post-you era
here where there
is an autumn bleaching into winter
meteors crowning my lunch hour
where once I was
fluttering in your arms
like the world’s largest butterfly.





My Holiest

They come
Redly
Muskily
Monthly
To remind me I am a tare for an ocean
With the uterus simmering within.
Look how
I’m downpouring vermillion
On the querulous bus aisle.
One day
When my veins are heavy with slit
I’ll miss these bruises validating me
First as a sapling
Later a fig tree in frenzied swing.
After my skin is consumed by swaths of bark
I’ll remember having unfolded
Slippery and scarlet
And ready for love.
When sorrow crimson birds
No longer come to roost
Amid the eden of my body
I’ll be sitting by the sunset
Recollecting the bounty of days
When I was at my hottest
My whoriest
My holiest.





Double Eve

I love you
With all the laughter and earthquakes
My body is capable of.
My double Eve
What do I know about
Your skin
But a desert
Your body
But that’s a sanctuary of mine?
I’m one rib lighter
And no more a snowy distance.
Let’s pray
to each other since the world is prey
To an October-clad chaos.
Listening out for damp rhapsody of revolution
As the night grows glistening and plum
Against your cinnamon skin.






Lourdes Veronica is an aspiring poet currently living in Rome. Her work has been featured in In My Bed Magazine (Canada) and in the Silver Birch Press I Am Waiting Poetry Series. She is a translator and a language teacher, and has been writing poetry for more than 15 years in English, Italian, Spanish, and Russian.