swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

 bending like light
Rebecca Dempsey

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There are poems like

There are poems like car engines, full throttle after the spark ignites. Whoa. You’re going
places with a roar thrumming through your chest until the words grind through gears. You
surge forward, taken places, gripping the seat, wind in your face. And you go, and go, and go 
until, instead of arriving at a destination, you become the poem’s momentum.

There are poems forged in demands and complaints, emboldened and brassy, they trumpet 
importance, occupying spaces taken as their own, declarative, insistent, repetitive. The
martial beat of drums within them vibrates of isms and schisms to a marching rhythm, 
glorying in sharp angled history.

There are poems like crystal: clear and limpid, flavourless but as essential as water, whose
weight isn’t present in the shape of words, but in impressions they take on, bending like light.
Oh, you say, so few phrases. You are buoyed and bowed too because respect is due in the
presence of the holy. Words slip by like fog, but your hands come away from your eyes damp
and you, renewed, are initiated.

There are poems sighed into being, caught on a spider’s web, run through with steel. So fine
the precise surgical cut is welcomed when it arrives unlooked for. You are pierced, but it was
inevitable. Henceforward, you can’t find any other way to exist except with the shards of the
words within, as the clean wound of the work silvers into lines recited across your skin.

There are poems like home, warm, comforting, familiar in your bones. Words housing the
spirit of welcome and quiet sustenance. Phrases offering soft touches of much needed rest,
and of a fire flickering hearth of solace for shop-worn hearts amid storms and strife.

There are poems devoured, words like apricots, overripe, softening into bruised flesh under
furred skin. Tangy juices run down your chin as you tongue the truth of the hard, jagged
centre. You learn phrases both sweet and rough, holding within them infinite promises of
green, growth, and harvest.

Fade / Out

Over the summer Shelley’s shoulders blistered, she stood reflected, skin confetti-ing cool
bathroom tiles. The pale mirror image of her winter self was burnished and transformed.
Even her plastic jewellery warped as she watched. Shelley’s necklace, a gift of primary
colours, too gaudy to wear, faded the season she set it on the window sill as décor, until it
became too hot to touch. Desperate for a cool change and too raw for loud displays, Shelley
quietly persevered (she should be shelling out for sheashells by the shea sore, her so-called
friends had jeered). Each night, Shelley’s hot tears didn’t relieve the pain, as she grimaced
and reddened, then bronzed, then reddened again in the unceasingly dry heat. Years later,
during winter there are rainbow-coloured crystals near the clinic window, but Shelley’s
memories are elsewhere; thoughts of the past and of futile, thwarted fractured futures are
scattered like beams before her sun-warped cells are cauterised. Afterwards, groggy, Shelley
wakes and squints, watching fleeting flashes of a refracted late dawn dance across tender,
newly scarred skin, but with clearer colours than her childhood ornaments ever possessed.
The light though, oh how she knows in what ways the light distorts all it passes through.

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Rebecca Dempsey’s works are featured or forthcoming in Ligeia, Miniskirt Magazine and Elsewhere Journal. Rebecca lives in Melbourne, Australia, and can be found at WritingBec.com.