Toxic Amalgamations Can Be Beautiful Too
They are too foggy,
Dreams, visions, etc.;
I don’t know, I don’t remember,
but o’ wait!
Yes, a distinct memory.
I started remembering words
hoarse, dry words mixed
with the lemonade air.
a conversation?
The smell of heated leather
chains me to the patio
where the goddess sits.
I have lost faith in her,
no longer a goddess
but my birthmother.
The second person in this conversation.
'Bitter sweet or sweetly bitter',
asking the nicotine-filled air.
A head emerges through the smoke,
mingling with the lesser being.
She exhales pure ash
and stares, ocean to mildew eyes.
‘Bitter sweet.’
Why, I ached to ask her
but it refused to come out,
my lips a graveyard.
Fruit trees,
beautiful ones.
Aristaeus but never Eileithyia,
my mother.
Leaves and Vines blend with the
anger that my mother had,
not anymore
malt as its replacement.
I wanted to try her cigarette,
the one kissed tenderly by her two lips now.
My fingers turn
black.
Black as black can be,
emission at the seams of my nails
up to the pretty blonde strands of my mother’s hair.
I wonder, lips formed
to ask, maybe.
‘Mascara,’ she answers,
knowing the question
before it escaped my tongue
and ventured into her ears.
Because we are entwined, now,
black and volcanic
two minds, one body
no
two bodies, one mind.
I wince,
the band-aids refuse to help;
including the Arnold ones
I used to put on myself.
Bittersweet.
My cuts grow bigger
until it resembled the cracks of the earth;
and ate my blue bike
and the ghost house I used to live in,
her being the one to haunt them.
‘You blame,’
who says.
‘You lie,’
says the other.
Not a conversation anymore,
but furious eruptions,
ruinous pertinence.
It was calamitous and vulgar,
glorious culmination,
as it destroyed everything;
leaving nothing but cinder,
carried by the wind
up into the lemonade sky.
Copyright © Nagham Al-Qahtani | Year Posted 2025
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