Selected poems ++ | Giovanna Saturni

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The sound of your heart like a boombox to my ears,
I am pressing myself further into your skin, eyes closing.
Your scent overtakes my senses.

Don’t move, please.
I am trying to melt myself into you.


Pulp Fiction Breakfast

A hand squeezed orange found on a countertop.
Next to it, a kitchen knife of sizable proportions.

(Out of focus, in background)

The motion of two blurred individuals, (like looking at two flies walking across a window in the morning, with your eyes half open).

Motion intensifies gradually. Then violently. A splatter of blood, an inhale.

A door slams.

The Sound of a body dropping heavy on the floor and a ray of sunshine washing over it.
The dust settles.

Then,
quiet.

The orange is still there, pulp everywhere.
Used up, violently discarded, it lays

next to a kitchen knife of sizable proportions.


Like honey

I close my eyes and I fall, in slow motion.
The nothingness inside myself is thick, like honey, and sickly sweet too.
The only way to survive the quicksand is to let it drown you.


WHEN I OPENED MY EYES

When I opened my eyes,
You were there,
The lights gathering around you
Like a neon halo

I blinked, and blinked again, thinking I’d
Imagined you, that there was no way you’d come
All this way for… me?
But
There you were;
Sitting sideways on a small, uncomfortable,
hospital chair
Crooked glasses sitting pretty on the tall
bridge of your nose,
Fingers delicately turning the pages of a
book.

Even now I think about it. How my emotions
went into overdrive and
I cried so hard the nurses wanted to sedate
me.

Even now I think about it. Think about how
i left the hospital as a duffle bag of human
pieces,
And you drove me home and put the parts
back together.
No instructions needed. All done
by heart.

I want you to know I remember all of it.
I want you to know that I know
We’ve left each other in every known way
since then
But
I remember what you did for me then.

I remember the night you became
my fluorescent angel.


Bouquet of memories

Do you ever feel like you’re
Withering away,
like an old bouquet of flowers
left up on a shelf to dry?
A token of a forgotten celebration,
It’s soft petals turning rigid, and then
crumbling
slowly becoming dust.
Their remains leaving a dull ache,
like a bruise, on your stomach,
reminding you of how you, too, will
age and fade; crumble,
Die.
The only proof of the bouquet’s beauty
is now stored solely in old,
sepia-toned memories.
Nothing palpable.
Nothing real. Not anymore.
Did it ever even exist anyway?
Why mourn the death of a bouquet, anyway?
Weren’t the flowers dead to begin with, anyway?


Musings

The coldness of heartbreak seems to have made a house of my bones.


cliché

laying on the roof like a sunbathing tourist on a chaise-longue
a white silhouette
staring at the blackness of space
thinking of how pretty the stars are
and how they’ve been dead for centuries
and how she read somewhere that beauty and decay are intertwined
and how summer makes everything slow down,
fills your lungs with warm air

melancholia settles into your skin.

symbolist poets associated summer with
the rotting of flesh
and suffocation.

symbolists and their macabre interpretations
everything is suffocating

loneliness is the innate state of the universe

summer is suffocating because it makes you aware
of how                                           alone                                           you are
and how alone everything is
and has been
and will be

forever

and beyond that.


Static

I feel like im being slowly sandpapered away.
Scraped at the edges until i slowly become smaller, less defined.
TV static for skin, and eyes, and mind. A monochromatic buzz of a person.
“Who am I?” has not been the question for some time now.
Now it’s just: “Am I?” Do I exist to anyone else than myself? I don’t know.
I hardly think I exist even to myself, nowadays


Pomegranate

Your mother breaks open the pomegranate, with her calloused
hands
and rotten flesh spills out,
falling onto the tablecloth,
brown-red stains spreading
slowly,
like a fresh wound, mocking you.

Blood blooms on white, a spreading fire.
Fury roots itself in the pit of your stomach, like a fishhook through the mouth.
If you are to become a tragedy, let it be violent.

Looking up into the blinding light of the sun
You refuse to be the lamb.
The sneering Gods crave flesh and blood,
and they shall have plenty.


Is anyone listening?

It’s been a while since I thought about you and didn’t cry.
I press my cheek into the damp earth
and close my eyes, as the sun shines above.
Nature soothes me like a mother.

The quiet is so loud it feels like drowning.
In my bad ear, I can hear blood rushing through me.
Hello?
…Anyone?

I slip my fingers through blades of grass, tether to the world.
I’ve never truly learned to grieve, and
I’ve never had much faith, but perhaps
this is enough.

If there’s anything out there, and if it’s where you are,
I hope it feels like this.
Quiet, and soft, and green.

I hope it’s peaceful.


Ghost

It comes in flashes now. Stop-motion frames, one following another endlessly.
Snap. Snap. Snap.

Your father’s face staring back at you,
and you can hear him laughing, you can
smell the tobacco on his skin.
Dreaming of him, night after night after
night.
Laying in bed, trying to forget the way the
wind whispered to you on that day in May.

If you close your eyes and feel the breeze
fly through the blades of grass. If you
breathe in the smell of blooming lilac, you
can almost pretend it’s not him under that
dirt.

Pretend like the drying flowers and the
burned out candles and the blinding
white stone are not real.

Pretend like the bags under your eyes
aren’t filled with ghosts of your past.


How it all goes by…

Sometimes, grief knocks into me with the force and speed of a freight train.
Other times, it rises like the tide, slow and steady, conversing with the Moon.
Most days, it’s a breeze,
a slight, continuous movement of air throughout your body. Something you feel,
but aren’t aware of unless you take a moment to think about it.
On worse days, it’s a dam breaking. It’s very difficult to patch the whole thing back up.

Some days, I cling to it. It’s all I have left.


23 y/o writer just trying her best. @oreiadae – Twitter

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