'Chrysalis' & 'Cosmic Onion': Two Poems by Amee Nassrene Broumand

CHRYSALIS

The windows of sun again have fallen. Darkness presses the pane, flickering.

Is something out there? The flickering increases the faster I breathe.

At dawn the monsters will flee unheeded & the bedclothes will float

into the trees, rippling with whickered sun. Yet tonight is moonless.

It’s here—what I feared in the sunlight of the endless field—with me in the dark.

Panicked to the knife-point, I tease apart the petals of my pounding brain,

the livid knot of gutty coils wherein my I, so they say, somewhere hides.

Yet the deeper I dig the more eyes I find, as though in truth I’m no I,

merely a bevy of ludicrous owls. Space distorts, eyelets chortle, & rain streams

down the glass. The ghost world has come.

Veined bubbles pulse from my fainting ear. My skin sloughs away

& the thud of my heart abates to an indifferent

whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrr—

Clawing through the bed, I sink my wrinkled gums into the earth.

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COSMIC ONION

an old woman in a book pulls a string of faces from her cloak

& collapses red into the snow flabbergasted the froth of the fight

& the sea beach glass eggs & mocking fog this is how

my feet were broken children don’t forget oddness how the moon

follows us from car windows my mother’s face skewed & raw

nesting below stairs I didn’t know her had she been replaced

by goblins drainpipes curve up from underneath the sidewalk

mouths open spider-hungry until the rains come

patchwork world pot of eggs ignivomous mountain at my back

my mouth mirrors the water guttiform until gone liars

layers planting fingers in ears to quell the inching of flowers

underground we boil in the footbath distal phalanxes gleam

below paper my skull rattles when I shake it looking for a soul

falling through my eye a red agate lodged in my cranium since birth

when I tunneled up through the rain-lit greenhouse & amoebas

wobbled on the glass & spiders smiled themselves into the floor

so much for lacework I punch through the surface to more

surfaces

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Amee Nassrene Broumand is an Iranian-American poet from the Pacific Northwest. Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Empty Mirror, The Ginger Collect, Menacing Hedge, Sundog Lit, & elsewhere. She served as the March 2018 Guest Editor of Burning House Press. Find her on Twitter @AmeeBroumand.