Amber Rambharose

Origins

Some days, it seems I’ve cut my teeth

on the trellis of your wrists, learned

language from the breaking of your body.

As if you have always been here. It is not

difficult to bear your weight, so much

less than whole. Your fractures ring

like rain into a well, my mouth, cliff

and chasm. Fingers dewed with awe,

you trace my waist, whisper into ribcage

the art of starving. Where other hands

have left their etchings you carve song

into clay, rhyme into the ruin of my body.

 

Picking Flowers

When he is forced to rifle through his wife, he thinks

of the tartness of little girl mouths and their resistant

sweetness. Not yet ripe, their kisses must be tempted

off the bough or twisted until relinquished. The pulp

of his daughters soaks spring into his fingers, trembles

on his tongue, makes his dreams pulse taut and tender.

If he could have a thousand daughters he would plant

them all beneath his bed and replace woman’s rankness

with their fragrant weeping. He does not know how long

he could watch them grow before descending to snap their

stems and bath his flesh in their terror and  their honey.

Delicacies

I feel almost adult in this dull light. He sits beside me,

smooths my hair, wishing, perhaps, that I had worn

more jewelry. I order my dinner in high school French,

tongue skittering over the surface of the language. He

asks the waiter for a delicacy. When the bones are brought

to the table, already hewed into glistening halves, he takes

one up in his hands, laps at its sweetness. The sentiment

of this extraction is familiar to me. His fingers gleam

with grease as he beckons for my mouth to open, dollops

the richness between my lips. This too is familiar – sound

of bone breaking, almost silent groan of pleasure.

 

Coalescence

Almost night and city sweats to cool

itself. Spires blur up, ribboning, like mist

off of a fountain. The brittle sky is casting

bones and my body bends in answer, bare

feet patterned with pitch, cross-hatched

and asphalt-pocked from hours roof-side.

In half-light my skin is sallow, swallowing

cloud pallor, almost pale beneath the belly

of the sky. I am cleaving to the coming

rain, the color it casts across my skin,

soaking me flinty ivory, cartilage-hued.

Soon, the skillet gray will crack and sheath

the buildings static, thickly as shadows

or snow. I will keep my body roof-bound,

pray for a strand of lightning to whittle me

electric, warp me wire sharp, singe me still.

CP

Amber Rambharose is finishing her final year as an undergraduate student at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, she spends much of her time searching—unsuccessfully—for a sound in the Southern United States that is as soothing as the screech of subway trains. Her poetry can be found in The Virginia Literary Review and Cicada Magazine.