Tag: Michelle Reale

INSENSATE by Michelle Reale

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INSENSATE

If I wanted to make certain proclamations I’d speak them into empty rooms, on cold nights, devoid of all sound. I would quiver for effect. I would generate my own predictions, but would refuse private readings, even if implored to do so. I can claim knowledge of certainties, but they come from the past, not the future, which feels like cheating, but it isn’t. If I wanted to give advice, that’s another story. Still, it might sound like this: If you have known hardship like a boot on the back of your neck, your solitude will feel like your very own fingers scratching your very own back— dissatisfying. If you have to imagine a space for love, not even a big space, maybe just a small space where emotions might fold up like an envelope and slip under your door, you will practically ensure that those eligible will suit themselves first and then wash their hands of you. No explanations will be forthcoming. A Buddhist will tell you “That’s life.” If when you move forward a bit it feels a lot like what afterward feels like, you have probably rescued yourself one time too many. Sympathetic gestures wear the right clothes, but are fraudulent and you gave up reading minds and murmuring agreement long ago. See this room, devoid of human sound? It is like a vessel that is in perpetual motion. You stand on the deck but cannot tell if what you see or feel is moving away from you or coming closer. Let yourself feel the force of gravitational desolation. The trapped fly knows it well. How it enters a room with such ease, knows it isn’t wanted, then exhausts itself to utter death trying to find an exit.

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Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.

Fractured Pastoral by Michelle Reale

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Fractured Pastoral

I

Lacrimal

We sat defiant in the garden of red flags for years. On a good day we might call such signs devotion. On bad days, science, or something like it, gone rogue. I couldn’t interest a single person in the luxury of memory, such as what it was like to weigh our words with care, as we used to on Sundays. Everything became a surrogate for experience. What I knew was that the first tear that comes rolling from the right eye would signal happiness; the left eye, pain. Out of both, frustration. My mother, forever the tectonic node between an imperative and a wish, told me to give it up for world peace. It didn’t sound like love. It sounded like advice with the rough and frilly edge of caution. A lip bit until it bleeds.

ll

Oracular

We watch misery from a distance. On which day and at which hour can we still enjoy a pure moment? The shell game of existence goes like this: Here, no here, not now.

And sometimes: never, not ever, not in our lifetime.

lll

Granular

There are some women who will still wear a red dress as they dust the strategically placed sacred images that adorn their tenuous house of cards. It would be hard not to admire such alacrity. In fact, I do. When reality makes its cameo appearance, we should know enough to greet it with caution. Ready the coffee pot, cover the fig tree, and apply one more coat of lipstick. Wait for its inevitable return and a longer stay. It will be important to focus our wayward attention on one beautiful thing per day. It will be obligatory to try to understand, when memory deserts us, that we still have the sun, in our shared and beleaguered skies, even though it is sometimes as pale as a lemon that knows its inevitable and inexorable fate.

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Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press, 2021) and Confini: Poems of Refugees in Sicily (Cervena Barva Press, 2022). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review.