Ally Malinenko : Three Poems

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Manic

Words,
like extra teeth that I am choking on
just to get down for a brief
second this time.

The ice in the glass,
is rolling in the amber scotch
like a mosquito from another lifetime
and I’m gripping it so hard
I can feel my hand starting to cramp.

My eyes are locked on yours
watching the wrinkle in your brow
come together and apart
a tide, or possibly a sea change
of your thoughts

I pace the floor
moving like a haunt from one room to another,
My ears hear the chatter of what I am, this
woman, enraged.

Demanding you to see the difference
between the court composer and the genius
wailing about the sea of failure that I would happily drown in
rather than the pittance of his sour lifeboat.
Things I want so desperately to believe.

And I am gone, adrift
in my own madness, manic
and feeling more alive
than I have in ages,
I can hear the blood pumping in my ears
and for a second I am that girl, again,
before I come back down,
sleep in the next morning
and return to the grey pallor
a shadow of my former self.

And darling, this cycle,
these days
they have seemed endless
and I am pushing this rock uphill as far as I can,
thinking to myself that at least if I fail,
it will still belong to me,
carved from the bones of this ribcage,
soaked in the hot sticky blood of me.
Like the car crash, decades ago
and the beaded glass,
the smashed hood,
my old lover looking somehow peaceful
trapped in that wreckage.

I think I started bleeding that day,
and it’s taking all these long years
to finally die.

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