IT IS SAD
It is sad
That your thoughts don’t mean much
Like how a movie theater
Projects colored lights into your head
And afterwards
In the bathroom
Face to face with yourself over the sink
That’s still you
In the grim and gray reality over the sink
Crumpled popcorn smeared into the carpet
The colored lights in your thoughts
Soaring
Like a very advanced camera
Photographing mountains or clouds
Also it is sad
When your brilliant mind has nothing of substance to settle upon
Like a high schooler
In the suburbs
Thinking complicated thoughts about lip gloss
A complicated web of mascara, and glossy magazines, and one particular boy
It is sad
When the brilliant thoughts look cheap or brittle in the light of day
It is a little embarrassing
To recognize your thoughts as cheap or brittle in the light of day
Some brittle thoughts
In the crisp light of morning
It is sad
When the thoughts that breathe in you
Gloriously
Wither and escape
As evidence having left just a faint whisper of smoke
Or an eminent or auspicious feeling
It is sad to have been abandoned
By your own brilliant thoughts
They well up in you and then are gone
You are composed of 100,000 slivers
Welling up and then gone
____________________________________________________________________
MY PREGNANCY WAS A LONG AND HAPPY NIGHTMARE
My pregnancy
was a long and happy nightmare
During which I ate
pint-sized tubs of ice cream and walked around the block
Becoming more tubby and unwieldy
as if living in the skin of a drum
Wielding and propelling my belly
feeling dreamy and druggy in the suburbs under the sun
I walked around the block
and watched episodes of The Twilight Zone
In 1960s America
it was silver and gray and all the people had disappeared
The tick of a clock
rang out
Men spoke in voices that were
urgent and clipped
Women languished in the oppressive heat
of a wet, dying sun
In The Twilight Zone the world was always
dying
In our imaginations
the world always dies
Drowned or burned or infected or
contaminated out
By imagining a death so huge
hoping to infuse our daily lives with sweetness or urgency by contrast
The world dies
how sweet is this morning
The world dies
how urgent my life
There is a belief that life
should be spent leaning forward as if squinting into a bracing wind
As if life’s juice or marrow or interior liquid
can be drained or squeezed or sucked
If the world dies I hope it will be
a cinematic death
A beautiful woman
laying down in green grass in a dewy forest
A golden grey mob tearing itself apart,
full of great emotion
When the world dies I would prefer it to be
without disappointment, shame, or regret
Shame hangs on a man’s neck
like a terrible bell
Joaquin when he arrived arrived
with no shame upon him
Instead he has a sweetness or urgency
inside him
For example he is pleased
with the bath’s warm water
He is pleased with his
small naked body
The world when he looks out across it
is a field of universal truths
It sways or rings with
unplucked truth
____________________________________________________________________
EMILY BLUDWORTH DE BARRIOS is the author of Splendor, a book of poems from H_NGM_N Books, and Extraordinary Power, a chapbook from Factory Hollow Press. The poems above appear in the chapbook, Women, Money, Children, Ghosts, from Sixth Finch. Emily’s poems have most recently been published in Jellyfish, New Delta Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Sixth Finch, and Tender. She was born in Houston and raised in Egypt, the United States, and Venezuela; she currently lives in Houston. More information can be found at www.emilybludworthdebarrios.com.
____________________________________________________________________
Read more by Emily Bludworth de Barrios
Three poems in B O D Y
Poem at Sixth Finch
Poem at The Nervous Breakdown
Two poems in jellyfish magazine