Approaching the Last Season and She Enters an Inuit World - Two Poems By Lara Gularte
APPROACHING THE LAST SEASON
Tips pierce her skin, she bleeds.
Moon fills the room with primal shining
as dying stars rest on her breasts.
head tucked under a pinion.
passes through the window.
Flutter of trapped wing beats
plucks her from the earth,
First published in the The Bitter Oleander
SHE ENTERS AN INUIT WORLD
She escapes into the wild to get away from people. The animal inside gnaws her ribs to free itself, as the mountain rises off its haunches, and thunder growls in greeting. Ache of bone, marrow of memory, pain cleaves, pulls her into the primal gene pool.
In sleep she dreams of finding eggs in high grass. At midnight the moon devours the mountain raw. The sky holds stars of animal skulls, skeletons of old friends. The savage of her heart wakes. The buck tilts its rack, and she's at his throat.
She lives for flesh off the bone. With only spirits in a soup pot, she wakes each morning hungry.
In the meadow she's on heels and paws, wrapped in pelts, her knapsack stuffed with animal tracks, crouched over old bones, mud, and ash.
Darkness gathers in the grass. The wind blows dust, turns the landscape imaginary, a doe invisible. The sun leaps from the paws of a mountain lion, its warm mouth on her neck. As the cat's grip tightens, she looks up at herself in the sky.
First published in The Bitter Oleander
Lara Gularte lives and writes in the Sierra foothills of California. Her book, “Kissing the Bee,” was published by The Bitter Oleander January 2018. Her writing may be found in The Gavea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry, and in Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora in the United States and Canada. Her work can be found in anthologies as well as various literary journals. Literary critic, Vamberto Freitas reviewed her work in Acoriano Oriental and Nas Duas Margens.She is a poetry instructor for the California Arts-in-Corrections program at Folsom, and Mule Creek prisons. In 2017 she traveled to Cuba with a delegation of American poets and presented her poetry at the Festival Internacional de Poesia de la Habana. She is an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine.Link below to Amazon Books, Kissing the Bee by Lara Gularte