Metamorphoses

Dante Rocio, Poland

(in collaboration with Pete Eriksson)

We are the shrapnel and the falling wall and the muddy earth

The pieces, the collision, it’s all a strain, at that the only one by the coral of your neck that just your mother could make

She never meant to harm you when she went to war over your choices, but she never intended to pollute the ocean either

Enclosure. Reprocedure. Oil tank sinks slowly by the customs of sunflowers, that just cannot save the waters, water clams, waters coiling bullock

Below sea level freighters blasts into the night through schools of fish, stirring up cadres of fickle coupon pickers and sending not a few neighbourhood snoops into a tizzy

Swallow. Both gliding and drowning, shores drizzling and slowly drainage.
Wings are nets. Humans are servants by the ambers that cracked out of fury by the coast.
The gunnels won’t back off, the abyss shines, follows

We have the guttural. We have five lents. We have the thirst. We have a sense.
Pearls don’t take “no” or mothers for an answer, feet can’t marry marble.
Chestnut locks say they’re ravens’ possession

The world should have been born as an ode.
There yet the pillars went away to rummage through rubbish through clocks to go bite their old bleeding tails. The plate, the heather, the amber crack failure, and for magnolias I want to see break.

Go and reek with blood for the forced birch over there.

Dante Rocío is a cosmopolitan poet, existential linguist and a student residing in Poland. Their work and activities concern language learning, literary translation, philosophical and artistic studies, teaching poetry, and public engagement. Their writing has been previously recognised in Diana Thoresen's "Red Hibiscus Anthology" and in the local literary monthly "Akant.”