Poems by Scherezade Siobhan

by Scherezade Siobhan

De Sade’s Leeches – II

my dear, there is no art – to how a horse breaks – all thresholds are contrived to corrupt –
make what you will of thunder – under the flashlight, we are all – a provocation of insects –
spry economies, stubborn facts – decimals changing places – between wriggle & release
once rifled, combed, aborted  – the body is a museum for curating  – the threadbare
indignities of biology – the annais i carnage – the plinth i mock, because – we are sitting
ducks for a seismic jailbreak – my name splits the difference – between a sin and a crime –
diamonds on a leather strap – my name kinks your neck – a collar of fur – all kinesis, all
nausea –  trauma makes a dactylogram of my arms – a pupil of forensics – tutelary  fucks –
proof so evident, it is invisible – therefore,  i unmarry my psychosis – between the person &
the pill –  i brush the gun – guzzle the barrel – hazard the trapdoor – charcoal blackmails my
skin –  my desire is oil on canvas – fervent with a polished musculature – i conceal its
etiology, slip out the seedling – from under the stone, a hand – because the children here
have turned – to stone – the stone has turned to god – god has turned – thats all – god has
turned – to where there are no exits – just the dead grin – of a bedouin horse – stilllife & all
that

Mira writes about The Mountaineer

There are theoretical expositions, and then there are visceral actualities.

— Ahmed Salman

Confession that we are a crowning blow of chemicals – this neural or
natural or neutered nuisance of intuition we can’t rewire to correspond.

I altar him as an exorcism of infinites.
A lunar mare of bone char and jahili odes.

Still his mouth swells in a tidal motion of foreign tongues.
Still his veins remain knotted in a seeding alphabet.

Dusk is a word that exhumes itself from a sanguine dot. Hardened
hemoglobin with its final clot in the gut of his borderline.

Disorder. Every descent begins
with a desire to bend the throttle.

And now he is nothing but a surrogate of innate mud –
a dateless invisibility, loosened fruit in a forever kingdom.

Or perhaps, an ambiguous parasite choking the earshot.
A recurring saltwater force majeure we often ricochet against.

At length, its censure – as intestinal as
a feat of centipedes stroked into a sigil of star-maps.

In the heat of his rugged zealotry is something I can’t
unfold enough to fit inside of. So I evanesce as if snow.

Each of our men come with an oystercatchers’ grasp, a rattling crate
hunkered beneath the obloquy of sodden depths. A room crushed

to dirt in the very hands of its mason. On a mattress of ash, his insomnia warbles
– your voice, the color of chestnut and riptide, the color of leather harness and stout beer.

The American masochism climaxing slowly within the italics of his eyebrows.
That larval arch is a brief foreclosure of time – an omega

articulated in the tumor of a butte. He knows how to pilgrim
upwards of any timeworn impossibility but always fails

to calculate the speed at which every horizon disappears.

 

Mira explains halal/haram

As dead as some constellations, we perambulate the rotten axis of grit-toothed
meatmarkets. Sizzled flesh flattens each street with its lax striation of butcheries kneeling
ear-deep in the choppy purr of Cantonese radio. Night is detonated basalt, stained fur – a
skyfull of opal-beaked birds embossing the powerline. Here, I perform a visage and incant
the body back to its practiced haggle. The length of him is a running voltage slowly
corroding the cathodes of my limbs. Appearance: willows hooked in nascent ligature,
tonsured pavements; the intimacy of forged displacements. Any kind of gutting is a
punctual repositioning of an animal’s stamina to exist inside its own vulnerability. A blade
partitions my rattleboned gluttony, unlocks the coda of a bloody cartilage. What is the
difference between a good surgeon and a good butcher except an economy of bloodlust? In
my oily back pocket, you are nothing but jangled metal. I split the coin through its
conjoined chiaroscuro. I grey the muscle, daunt the feathers, foil the tendons. Entrust me
with the selenography of your tusk-white carcass, your bones embroidered inside an iced
fish slanted like a silvered candlestick – I will swallow this bottled fire. I will spit out an
oyster of light.

 

Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo-Rroma behavioural scientist, community catalyst, and hack scribbler of 2 poetry collections – Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2015) and 1 poetry pamphlet – to dhikr, i (Pyramid Editions, Forthcoming in 2017).  Her work has been featured, translated and published internationally in galleries, anthologies, bios of okcupid users as well as literary spaces such as Rattle, DIAGRAM, Berfrois, Queebmobs, FEMINISTING, Wasafiri, Word Riot amongst many others. She is the creator and curator of a cross-cultural, global dialogue space in form of “The Mira Collective” that raises voices, awareness and funds to fight gendered violence and street harassment. She can be found squeeing about militant bunnies at zaharaesque.com or @zaharaesque on twitter/facebook/ig.