I paid for all the happiness that was bestowed upon us by the Ides of October.
I used to feel the presence of the child all around me.
A woman said I should pick a piece of slough cast by a snake and wear it against my skin.
I did it.
Flushed as a young peach every sunset became a resurrection.
Roses wrapped around my waist and later in June the child was born.
A new October sets our pictures on the Spanish chest.
Emotions animate your cheeks.
Every night above the trees the moon nurses the stars.
When I see cocoons of the larvae, I think silk as soft as the hair of the child.
When I say I love you, I think death as the harbinger of birth.
Your lips tremble and your voice flattens.
I know you love me.
With nude fingers the Ides of October betroth us again.
[Ides as the 15th day in March, May, July, and October according to the Roman calendar]
I can see the woman who assumes things. Every night she picks the flowers that I throw on the road: withered lilies of the valley. She wants to be me. She wants my blood. She does not know I rearranged the bell-shaped whites so no one else can breathe their sweet scents. No one else can be me. No one else can make you, you.
The woman puts the withered flowers in her bag.
A new moon rises over her left shoulder. Bad luck.
I shiver.
I rush to protect her.
I stumble.
Before he died my father said:
If you try to do justice to the wicked, you will forget to do justice to the virtuous. And if you forget to do justice to the virtuous you only work for yourself. That is the biggest sin of all.
I have to think again.
My poetry collection Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings is available on Amazon here . Passions featured in San Francisco Book Review Passions featured in Manhattan Book Review.
image: Sandratsky Dmitriy; Shutterstock; [link]
Motto I get drunk on love, charity, and passion. These are my professions.
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I walk into the three days we spent together.
On the first day, a nude silence wraps around my lips. Shortly after I can hear the noise of wine poured into glasses.
The hour to get drunk on love has come.
I touch your skin and another you is born.
Birds invade the sky.
A banquet of candles floods the streets.
A white thread ties my blood vessels at the exact moment when a religious procession walks by.
On the second day, drunk on charity, my sights descend upon the earth.
The dirty hands of the woman who owns wells touch my skin.
I hear your voice. I will not counsel her or belittle her desires. All she will do is sell her fake dreams in the corner of an empty street for her entire life.
I forbid you.
By punishing her you would have ruined the very thing you set out to safeguard: our love.
On the third day, stars melt in our palms like soft grapes in winepresses.
The intimations of you and I, with their smell and softness of grass and late autumn roses, invade the room.
A convulsive joy impregnates your eyes.
Words have no pigments and no form. Their register sinks in gravity, shiny coil by shiny coil, musical key by musical key, sleepy touch by sleepy touch.
The perfection of the afternoon’s poplars blesses the air.
Possessed by passions, under the wing of a bird, we died three days ago.
My poetry collection Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings is available on Amazon here . Passions featured in San Francisco Book Review Passions featured in Manhattan Book Review.
image: Sandratsky Dmitriy; Shutterstock; [link]
Feminine sexual scars: real, invented, and in some cases only dreamed. Wounds exposed in plain view in order to obtain something in exchange. If not justice, then sympathy. If not sympathy, then the attention of a certain male prototype.
A desperation to direct the masculine imagination toward the submissive feminine with its painful blows; blows exacerbated by the brutality of our patriarchal society. Yet something more was added to that: female purple skin calling for the asperity of males’ touches, abandon, suggested nudity, swollen lips, tons of adjectives filled with a sickening excess of sweetness.
I remember him saying.
An entire arsenal of attraction built on wounds that should be sanctified not used to incite maleness. Those women hang their sexual lesions like paintings on walls for the sole purpose of giving males glimpses under their underwear.
C’mon. You know it.
I did not. However, he was a man of high intellect. It was difficult to go against him. I had to wait. I had to outmaneuver him.
So, I played my feminine submissive part. Add some madness to that and I am quite sure I looked like Ophelia running from room to room dressed in black negligees incapable of understanding my own distress. What a nightmare.
Was he right?
excerpt from my manuscript Remembrance of Love (working title) My poetry collection Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings is available on Amazon here . Passions featured in San Francisco Book Review Passions featured in Manhattan Book Review.
It was a sort of dematerialization that left behind the scent of orange blossoms and the vague memory of sultry afternoons growing by the margins of the pond: those afternoons in need for seed germination. I am sure you can remember them.
You and your love for me which have always looked for my blood. I told you I am air and therefore I do not have a body. I fill the space in which other bodies manifest themselves.
I am every breath you take in your nights of love when …please continue readinghere
You can read my Spillwords Author of the Year Interviewhere. My poetry collection Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings is available on Amazon here. Passions featured in San Francisco Book Review Passions featured in Manhattan Book Review.
I am delighted to host Diana on my blog today. Diana is a fantastic novelist and a wonderful friend to those who know her.
Please stop by to congratulate Diana on the launching of her novel Liars and Thieves, the first book in her new Unraveling the Veil series.
Global Link Purchase http://a-fwd.com/asin=B08FGQ2W3Q
Blurb:
Behind the Veil, the hordes gather, eager to savage the world. But Kalann il Drakk, First of Chaos, is untroubled by the shimmering wall that holds his beasts at bay. For if he cannot cleanse the land of life, the races will do it for him. All he needs is a spark to light the fire.
Three unlikely allies stand in his way.
A misfit elf plagued by failure—
When Elanalue Windthorn abandons her soldiers to hunt a goblin, she strays into forbidden territory.
A changeling who betrays his home—
Talin Raska is a talented liar, thief, and spy. He makes a fatal mistake—he falls for his mark.
A halfbreed goblin with deadly secrets—
Naj’ar is a loner with a talent he doesn’t understand and cannot control, one that threatens all he holds dear.
When the spark of Chaos ignites, miners go missing. But they won’t be the last to vanish. As the cycles of blame whirl through the Borderland, old animosities flare, accusations break bonds, and war looms.
Three outcasts, thrust into an alliance by fate, by oaths, and the churning gears of calamity, must learn the truth. For they hold the future of their world in their hands.
Q & A
How many books have you written? Do you have a favorite of your books and if so, why?
My goal, years ago, was to write 15 books. With the addition of this trilogy, I’ll have reached 19 total books! What a surprising journey it’s been. I actually don’t have a favorite. When I write, I get intimate with my characters. I experience their challenges, sorrows and longings, their tragedies and victories. They become people I’ve known and cared about, part of my life. Are all my books equally well-written? Of course not, but to me they’re all special.
Trailer:
Author Bio:
Wallace Peach started writing later in life after the kids were grown and a move left her with hours to fill. Years of working in business surrendered to a full-time indulgence in the imaginative world of books, and when she started writing, she was instantly hooked. Diana lives in a log cabin amongst the tall evergreens and emerald moss of Oregon’s rainforest with her husband, two dogs, bats, owls, and the occasional family of coyotes.
He acted like what he was: one of the most handsome and wealthiest bankers of the city.
Nightly candlelight parties in his villa whose balconies opened toward the ocean. Château Mouton Rothschild Pauillac: deep reds and an unmistakable taste of eucalyptus. Coquilles Saint-Jacques, escargots, Provencal fish stew whose aroma imbibed the corridors from lazy late afternoons until early mornings when it was replaced by that of coffee and freshly baked croissants.
It was an act. He looked like a man who while sleeping with one woman thought of another. Teeth planted in warm lips in an eerie absentness of mind; nothing less than automatism. His entire being was consumed by something else, something as imperative as the birth of a child: the naked vision of a woman whom he could not have.
excerpt from my manuscript Remembrance of Love (working title)
