BARBARA JANE REYES

Estuary

Cherry

Pink

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Estuary

 

Here, you seek solace, gliding in your vessel, sinew pulling skins taut over its cedar skeleton, the quickest blade slicing still water. Spear-fishing the silver current, your spine perpendicular to the cloudless sky. With the longest strokes, you surge into the river’s mouth. For this you know there is no song.

 

Here, you coax the heat of your body into this cool water, and soon after, how salt crystallizes upon your shoulders. This quiet portent, slick, translucent sea kelp, patient buoys spilling tadpoles from their ruptured pods.

 

Here, you came on foot once, when you were a girl, weighted, breathing arid winds for days. Trudging through wild grasses and sage, whiptails scurrying about your ankles. You shivered in the cool night air until the glimmering and gleaming of water catching sun returned light to your lungs. Your hummingbird winged heart, and still such silence. Stepping upon the salt-lined shore, how the breeze tickled your face and hair. You scattered your father’s ashes, dissipated his words; some say you bathed in your father’s ashes. Some say you breathed in his very words.

 

Here, no dragonflies accompany you, only the lean sound of you breaking the water’s surface. This one song which only your body could compose.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cherry
After Yedda Morrison’s Crop

 

liquored push      unfolded thighs    he advances inserts into girl        inward breathing
machine peeling   sugar tongue mine         tears tender        unripe cherry bleed 
blow her rupture             condone mechanical       pump fire          when she opens  
mouth    ingests   he inserts           hands spread eagle         bind                  nightshift quiet 
skin frozen          invites entrance  tinseled hostess slivered  blows     job hazard 
teeth break in                  fruit flesh wet   lips open            handled pulling   it is dark


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pink

 

Wet work as a euphemism for movies of a young short skirt, showing all her pink, with still-wet newspapers and staring people. Fluttering amateur, brunette teen, spreading her tight pink, her sweet, sweet wet pink. Picture her describing how he wet his trousers, how he transitioned into a man who “longed for the pink” of a sniper’s rifle, the very warning of what may be found lascivious by ascetics. A wet pink rose, unaware of the war that raged inside of her, demanded red carpet thick and pink, quite wet from her being fucked so hard until she couldn’t take it anymore. She had yet to learn that war policy is neither made, nor altered while hospital naked and shaven. Dreampink and pearl fortune spilling, his throbbing gun. The day after the blast, she sat in a dirty shirt watching the adults’ wet clothes strung above. A spigot was the only water source for the tiny pink flowers growing, the basement of girls in wet shirts, hot and blonde, young sucking teen sluts of gangbang galleries. Their frenzied little faces saying stop the war upon teen pussy, pink and shiny, parted petals and swollen flesh. Picture her, slippery, cleaning the floor bent over naked, the color of bunny ears, the color of don’t cry, the color of don’t complain about wet feet, about war games, about problems of fires spluttering out before we bang her wet body in the rain, in the quiet dream, in the pink pieces of the sunset.