Two Poems by Lilah Clay
/I Am Thirty-Two
Lilah Clay
Thirty-two. Skip. Because the spent heads of sunflowers are downturned in mourning. Skip. Because I fall and nearly break my leg on an idea that must defeat me.
Thirty-two. Skip. Because sometimes a name is a landmine, and to speak it is to step on one. And to write it down is to give it an hour that will not burn.
Skip. Because I loved _____ with one eye closed, a black sail. Owl feather over bed. Lover under me. Petroglyph, mule deer, eyelash. Mullein lined river, ribbon snake in piñon. Kissing
brows, kissing knuckles, kissing kneecaps. Oatmeal soap, baked apples, kestrel eating lizard. Passion eating phases of the moon down to rind.
If nothing else, skip the dream that is broken by its own longing.
Skip. Because bluebird hits window. Maybe dead, maybe stunned. But the wings are turned around and around and ripped off anyway. I watch, I say nothing to him.
All the courting gifts at my altar, revered and then aflame. When I am done. This tenderness slides beneath dusk's tongue. A slow dissolving.
Beneath sky where my name was once wrung out his throat. Then a star shot across to confirm. How fleeting this would be.
You Are Nineteen
Lilah Clay
There is an hour I want you
to keep for yourself.
When you slept with throwing knives
under your pillows to get closer
to Jade
from your novel.
Or when you jumped from
a moving truck
during a panic attack
near the hospital.
Or when you chopped off all your hair
at five in the morning,
drunk on Lyme-induced insomnia
and laughter.
*
You were nineteen once,
inverted lighthouse
in the underworld.
Climbing Up the Walls
on repeat.
Forget vacuuming the vomit.
Forget your need for fame
to validate your existence.
Forget every teenage boy
who did not understand
you were forging the Empress
from scar tissue.
*
Take the hour you left
the Pacific Northwest.
Before you moved to live
with mother in Taos.
Take that burrito picnic shrouded in fog
with Tosh and card games
at Glass Beach.
Where you spent childhood
with mother collecting beach glass
for her wire-wrapped jewelry.
The cliff above
a former dumpsite.
Broken plates and bottles
tumbled by waves
for a century.
Red and orange the rarest colors
from taillights of cars
that used to be made
of glass.
*
Keep the hour that is every hour
the page did not give up on you, Lilah.
For the page was once
poplar, fir and larch
before it gave itself
to your pen.
These two poems are an excerpt from my unpublished poemoir through chronic Lyme. Each year is a poem from the tick bite at age twelve toward emergence at age thirty-five. Lyme disease is a global epidemic that often leads to many years of physical pain and psychological suffering. The manuscript delves into the underworld of illness, embracing the shadow self and hidden strength... while also affording moments of intimacy with others.
Lilah Clay's poetry has appeared in more than a dozen literary journals including The Bitter Oleander, World Literature Today, and The Courtship of Winds. She loves howling with the coyotes and daydreaming of shoreline with lighthouses, lilacs, and peregrines. She writes on themes of loss, healing, and the intuitive and medicinal powers of nature.
