words on stillborn air

Camila Hernández, United Kingdom

if the sun should blacken to an asterisk,
the lines on my pages would be clouds
which have flatlined, and the sky –

an off-white, material, tearable surface,
a watermark lost to light
which opens and closes itself –

like the eye of morn that calls
to our stories despite the moon’s unfinished
tales – boundaryless blue enjambed
yet paper stings like lightning slices through
my index finger – stained red by a sheet
as nearest to white as truth can get.

how the snow exploits
the evergreen tree,
in spring – casting its ashes
in a river.

my fingers are flaccid twigs tangled
around this pen – knuckles wrapped
in cling-film around bone, palms
as damp as hail when it streams
down the cheek of tree-bark,
black-ice ink scrapes the pages, its message
invisible, wordless, constellations in dirt
despair – shackled in parentheses, dulled &
unseen by the tendency of white
to contrast & dissipate –

and, if the sun
should blacken

to an asterisk,
the earth could not live
without us writing,
and the ink, malleable,
obedient, does what is
asked of it.

rite of spring

Camila Hernández, United Kingdom

organic Persephone –
you revel among bountiful crops
the grain of your wrists
like sultry caramel oak
your irises a shrouded hue
beneath the glisten of mud –
you were born
in a venomless time and suburb,

blossom lips pursing
with atrocious beauty –
the thinly robed narcissus
too strictly compassed
in cages of wings
instead of petals

you spring forth
into a field of weary wayfarers
suspended in formaldehyde
as when the sun
ceases to glare its copper scorn
across the sky –
the bruised elderberry’s tavern surfaces
by command of Hades’s infernal arms

and the stunted weeds jerk
against the howling breeze
of his raven fog, dried purple thistles
glare, a cool moonshine fading gaunt and spare –
the veiled corridor of your abode
dissipates as does the daylight
to nightfall’s immovable corpse

and you are plucked from the land
like a petal woven from its mother’s silk
an abductee enthralled
against the serpent earth and
spiked into the underworld

waiting –
for when you are free
to soak in fragrances rather than fists
and thaw out the heart
that hardened, and live
underfoot – married
with the earth.

this time, you know
where you’re going.

Camila Hernández is a 19-year-old Venezuelan-born, Yorkshire-bound poet and student journalist. Her literary, art, and film reviews have appeared in the University of York's Nouse student newspaper and on the student-run Norman Rea Gallery's online blog. Her poetry has also been featured in The Looking Glass anthology. She is interested in the cross-pollination of inner and outer landscapes of the self and nature, and how modern and postcolonial visions intersect to show us colours and contours that we'd never dreamt could define us.