Nocturne

It floods in manic
notes of a violin,
with the desire to be tasted
in a primal sense—
nothing delicate or refined
or attached to love
but a mad grappling
of flesh

 

falling from dizzying
heights, drowning
in passion, suffocating
                      suffocating fast

                         at speeds
      greater than sound
and light;

 

all of it barking
moaning
obscenities into
the crease of night

 

overlooking who they
want you to be
long enough for

the earth’s under current
to rise up through your back
and steal everything.

 

Aleathia Drehmer

Published by Mighty Mercury

We Do Our Best Hellen Keller in the Spaces Between

I am painting
your face under
my eyelids
the crease of color
a braille my fingers
can’t speak.

 

You live there
between the lines
where definition
never touches you;
where most won’t
look for you.

 

You're layered
and covered in spindles
we all want to prick
our fingers on
to bleed life
for just one
solitary moment.

 

The vapor of your ideal
hovers over me constantly—
our connection
an ESP we never speak
of, but mouth in silent
air to not disturb
the ancients
from their slumber.

 

Aleathia Drehmer

Published by Mighty Mercury

The Leap

Our worlds divergent,
simultaneously, yours
adjoined to heaven overlooking
a river as wide and blue
as my heart; mine mounded
with defiled snow and frigid hope.

 

For one instant I leap
into that cloud, hanging
like a kiss in the air, face
first and arms spread
as if wings defying
the constructs of matter
and dispelling gravity.

 

It swallows me whole,
spits me back out
onto the pavement
in this place sullied with gray
leaving only the faint
whisper of water
on my cheek.

 

Aleathia Drehmer

Published by Mighty Mercury

Too Young to Know the Truth

Cold river winds

push through
my town this year,
j  u  m  p  e  r  s
from the span of the bridge
into shallow waters
with little results
other than further
scars of inadequacy
and ruined sneakers.

 

I crossed that bridge
with uncertainty
many times, the pull
to soar from its girders
in stop motion animation—
a figment wish to go
out like that, but in the end
I chose the underbelly
with Virginia Woolf
in my childish pockets.

 

Aleathia Drehmer

Published by Gutter Eloquence, Issue 15

Beyond Recognition

He looks at her crying face
marked sharply with fear
as he asks himself
who is this woman?

 

He makes her suffer—
fingers gripped into
the bones of her arm
imprinting this new filth,
erasing 40 years in a series
of blows:


Blow by blow
there is emptiness;
Zen-less inhumanity
seizing every wire
in his brain.

 

Her tears reach him
suddenly, softening
everything while he
wonders why his wife
is crying, bruised and beaten,
with his hands like weapons.
He has nothing left
but a face he can’t recognize.


Aleathia Drehmer

Published by Gutter Eloquence, Issue 15

The View From Plymouth Rock

“Clearly,” she whispered, “you left hope on the black horizon knowing my heart would settle on time and geography.”

 

The pillow said nothing.

 

“Why are you a stalwart sailor ready to go down with the ship?  I’m on the deck with empty hands searching waters for evidence to an unknown crime.”

 

Aleathia Drehmer

Published by Blink Ink

Punctured Tones

(with Brad Burjan)

The walls hum

with uncertainty
only because they

               stand

in thought, fluctuating
atoms of soundless
mind stuck in the air
like a black and white
picture that [[deafens]]
in the darkness,

                awakens with the thrill

                                  of defeat

                            and it’s

        H                  E              R             E

where the gods huddle

underneath            the skin of air
creating cavities in teeth
from the sweet decaying

                  hope of filling that point

of time that a million Buddhas

                    never

                    could.

 

The heart quickens to stop

       and is entrenched in something

a little more than what even Jesus

could imagine.

 

The heart quickens to stop

        as lips hover to drop

a punctured tone and the only thing
you hear are heart attacks falling
from the mouths of men.

 

The heart quickens to stop.
We are all accomplices
to murder in the end.

 

Aleathia Drehmer/Brad Burjan

Published by Red Fez, Red Reader #1

Generation of Guns

(with Brad Burjan)

Sometimes these bones

are strangers, touching
each other in the night
like blind/deaf lovers.
They call each other
by name, their words
Morse code vibrating
into fresh cells.

 

Like frightened armies
cut off at the river,
they move together
in the trenches, faces
smeared with mud,
limbs articulated
with their sentences
hovering
in the open mouth
of the air…searching.

 

Legions of men rise
and fall in this mist,
this place of stopped
time and stolen history,
exhaling the exposed
wounds we’d rather
not carry.

 

All that dried blood
of reality pools
and hardens in
cold chambers—
in a generation of guns
now frozen in the memory’s
trigger and I’d rather shoot
the teeth out of love
than admit defeat or truth.

 

So
I’ll just sit here
choking on every syllable
that weighs down
my throat, and cease
to resist destiny.

 

Aleathia Drehmer/Brad Burjan

Published by Red Fez, Red Reader #1

Conversations Around the Water Cooler

Grey chairs huddle in a semi-circle around the room.  It smells stale in here as the water cooler and the air conditioner sagging in the window battle for bragging rights over the public radio announcer talking about some factoid of the Middle East.  I sit alone clutching my bag unsure of this day the same as I have sat feeling unsure about all the days that came before it.  The threat of feeling this way for all the days after it, weighs slightly heavier than I want.

 

I inspect the dissection of my therapist’s waiting area.  It was once a grand old home now chiseled into cold spaces and sterile pools patients can pour their anxiety.  I reconsider making my session….there is still time to book….he doesn’t know I am here, but then another patient comes in. There is a tension between us, a slight pause in the conversation he is having on his cell phone, before he sits down.  Our eyes meet for mere seconds which is just enough to be recognized on the streets of this small town; enough to cause an awkward passing down the cereal aisle at the supermarket.  We look away not wanting to know each other’s story.  It is just better that way.

 

My hands are curled tightly around the bag I bought while in England.  It reminds me of that day with mixed feelings surging from the fabric into my skin.  There are more mixed feelings in my head.  My hands and head are having a conversation without the use of my mouth as if I didn’t count.  I’m talking to myself again.  I’m answering too.  I hold in a laugh at the back of my tongue thinking about how crazy I am.  I am a cliché.  I am a child.  I am a frightened rabbit.  I am considering these sessions will be Catholicism’s coup over my heart and thoughts.  I will Hail Mary and Our Father my way to the crossroads.

 

I hear my name.  Who said that?  Did I say that?  Did I just ask myself a question and wait for an answer?

 

“Do you want coffee?” the therapist says poking his head around the corner.  I jump.

 

“It appears I don’t need any.”  I try to joke.  He gives me his best therapist-I-don’t-really-think-you-are-crazy smile.

 

I follow him to the room.  There is a couch.  I fight the urge to be another cliché.

 

Aleathia Drehmer

Published by Red Fez, Red Reader #1