#danusha lameris

[evenasmallcough]

Glass by Danusha Lameris

It's the small things that haunt: Oranges, because my mother used to peel them for me, slip the rough sections in my mouth. Luckies, because of the wayward boy who lit my first, leaning against the railing of the pier. "O sole mio" wafts up from the downstairs apartment. Now it means all those summers. Can't they just turn it off? I walk through Queen Anne's lace in late September down to the cover where I used to meet a man who was dying, that flower now in my own vocabulary of loss. What doesn't in time enter grief's lexicon? When I think of our house after the fire, all I see are pools of pink glass—once our ice-cream bowls— melted on the ruins.

[xiaq]

Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

Feeding the Worms by Danusha Laméris

[poemsforthesehours]

From Danusha Laméris's book, Bonfire Opera.

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

Danusha Lameris ~ Let Rain Be Rain

[snimeat]

— lone wolf, d.l.

[surrendermyheart]

Feeding the Worms by Danusha Laméris. ID in alt text

[kitchen-light]

Danusha Laméris, from "Bonfire Opera", University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020 [ALT TEXT under cut]

“Chance” by Danusha Laméris

They talked about it while soaking in an unusually deep red tub at his rented house. How the constellations had gone out of their way to align, so that their paths converged for a time in the redwoods, in a shingled cottage above the creek. It was all so perfectly temporary. He had easier hours at work. She, the willingness and freedom at midday. Even some nights. Statistically improbable that their bodies fit together the way they did. And that the words he whispered fit so seamlessly inside her ear. But― isn’t it written in the Holy Books?―the gods do not like to dole out too much honey, so as not to saturate the palate. Or the soul, which must be allowed its hungers. And this was honey by the spoonful: He played guitar and sang for her while she soaped her limbs. He peeled off her robe with his teeth while she read him his favorite poems by the fire’s last flame. Perhaps it is a mercy to have such limits. Isn’t unimpeded pleasure almost unbearable? And isn’t there always someone, just outside the frame, who has to pay? When the ancient astrologers began to track the bodies of heaven, they must have meant to catch the gods at the moment of their brief indulgence, that softening, when they allow us more than just a little taste. And right before, in their infinite and merciless wisdom, they take it back.

[filthyprotozoan]

Feeding the Worms (poem by Danusha Laméris)