Love Me Vintage
There is always time for beauty,
for kisses and
for getting lost forever
in the circuitous side streets
of sequins and sepia.
I have devoted myself, see,
to these mason jars of sunshine
and stained glass windows
that remind me a little
of the way gentleness
colors the silence
when you smile.
I drink my Valencia chocolate
thick and decadent,
like an untamed offering
of nature to my senses,
and feel as favored as
that moonless April evening
when you once casually
brushed a stray strand of hair
from my face.
I read passion
within the details
of the crochet trimmings
on the edges of things,
get entranced
by the saga of silhouettes
cast by mosaic lamps,
and say to myself, “Life
is definitely Wedgwood blue,
or close to it.”
Here, I love you,
and with a ballerina’s grace
I move among gilded birdcages
and wistful cherubs
in smooth plaster,
sprays of wildflowers
to brighten corners
and the nourishing poetry
of traditional home cooking,
collages of ephemera
on the translucent material
that the past is made of,
and butterflies
with intricate wings encased
between the blond wood
of the coffee table
and the tempered glass
upon which I have lain
these pages
to pen these lines
and tell you
everything I see is fashioned
after some previous dream.
We love
in order to teach
the dark luxurious universe
to make room
for all the beauty we can make.
My Favorite Miracle
Stars died for us
a little every night
five million years ago
so that when we looked at them
tonight, leaning against
the passenger door of
your Chrysler, we could
watch them twinkle.
And who knows, maybe
when we were busy
looking at each other’s eyes
one of them quietly split in two
and the second half
made its way across that
astral page above us, and
burned up on the stratosphere
within the span of a kiss.
But I don’t mind
missing a shooting star
when all my wishes
have just come true.
It is enough that
I am with you
to keep my soul hushed
in a constant state of wonder.
We are a medium-sized miracle
surrounded by great ones,
for instance, the sun
from whom the tea candle
on the dinner table
the night we fell in love
learned how to burn.
And our love is a strand
woven into the fabric of
the splendid universe
whose pattern rises and falls,
pulses and evolves and remains,
and if we can be still
and hold each other just right,
we can watch each other
grow a little more beautiful
in the light.
Worshiping at the Ruins of her Temple
She is stuck in the wrong version of the past.
She has cornered herself into believing you can’t
teach the flesh not to want what it knows isn’t
good for you. She tempts fate and sleeps with
perdition. She throws herself into every way she
can destroy herself and squander the future. She
creates lives just to kill them, slowly. For they all
have his face, and she blames him for everything.
She loves him in the way that you can be fatally
bound to a beautiful mistake, the kind that makes
self-love and self-loathing appear interchangeable.
She comes every time he calls, and calls him her
own, and spits in the face of the parts of him that
can’t belong to her, in her quest to hurt all that is
innocent, because nothing and nobody that isn’t
as soiled and as broken as she is deserves a place.
And she will draw them all out, angry and bitter,
and face them, defiantly and proudly guilty of all
they accuse her of, mock their pain and make dark,
twisted trophies of their splintered lives, get drunk
on the curses they hurl at her like long-term poison,
because this is the end game for her. She is in hell,
but she is not done sinning, against her soul or
against her body. She made one bad choice and,
as a consequence, she would punish the world by
making all other bad choices she can think of, and
with each step she takes on that damned road,
there is less and less of her left to save. Until the
world feels sorry enough to kindly turn back the
clock for her. And restore to her what she threw
away back when her body was free and she could
take any heart she picked.
Iris Orpi is a Filipina poet, novelist, and screenwriter currently living in Chicago, IL. She is the author of the illustrated novel The Espresso Effect and four books of compiled poems, Cognac for the Soul, Beautiful Fever, Rampant and Golden, and Hand Painted. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications all over Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa. She was an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Contemporary American Poetry Prize and was nominated for the 2018 Orison Award for Poetry.
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