∧
font size
∨

One Poem  

Anuel Rodriguez

Refuge

A colony collapses every time she blinks.
In mirrors when she dreams, she sees hair like threads of night

and a smile as crooked as a frame on the wall after a quake.
Her eyes are the color of brown sea glass

and her heart is a cluster of shipwrecks.
She once read somewhere about how a bee

will go insane and die if it is separated from its hive.
In her case, the hive separated from her.

A bishop once told her of a revelation from the prophet,
while he was in prison, that she’d had an abortion

which was a sin. So she had to be ousted from the church
even though the revelation wasn’t true.

She left with a fist full of voices and returned
driving a motorhome on a mission to take back

the cocooned children she’d left behind.
She often retreats inside the walls of herself

and wonders how long she can run
from the flames of her own creation.

Her story is a spattering of letters few will ever read.
And her ghost is the honey left on the lion’s tongue.