These poems are written keeping in mind the natures of femininity and female rage, the devotion personified in the bracelets of time with natural influences and the contorted view of society’s take on love and relationships. The piece was inspired by the experiences cultivated in a house under the veil of henna and steamed rice and explores the ruin of culture and family trauma through eyes sore from memories. Its exposure in the world seeks to rinse cultural trauma and secure light in family relationships and decisions.
TW- Domestic Violence
Sinners and rhinestones have always gotten along, the jingle of my handcuffs in broad
Latin sunlight
Crashing the beach wave alone with my ubiquitous mind, replaying the apex of female
rage
How she screamed, and how she fought, her battle raging as her world beneath her
second brain relapsed,
Her father’s screams glimmer across the pianos, bottles of wine whose corks still gleam
wet from when he poured just a drop on her tongue; How narrow the world seems, just
seams of battered dish soap in a world brought down by video game yelling fanatics
Crooked lights track down her mother’s face her eyes look up to a moment locked in
vows
Bouquets and baronesses, Wedding gowns and ripped bows, kisses that strung the air
with intoxicated blows of romance, their extended honeymoon- , the cupboard crashes
down on her, her soul falling beneath the depths of her underbelly, the monster snarled,
she falls pitts down into her abyss, an abyss she foresaw but clammed hard to wish not,
- Their second year in the white chapel of Paris, him whispering over her while the
gargoyle loomed over their bodies, like the sunlight jealous of the moon shining her love
on the stars, like the seas kissed by the tides, its foam latched on to the shore to destroy
all of creation or like the fire lights whose clandestine wings buzzed near the moths
eyes to pry them to a night of Skyfall, - their trips to the Russian Advocacy, his eyes, glances that tripped her falling heartbeat,
directionless moments in pure unscriptural ekalavia, his slow moments in time catching
her like a droplets of sand lingering on an hourglass after its final hour, whispers of
debates on a couch, whose springs court the thorns of hallways adorned with black and
white folk, whose invisible seams that he turned emerald to remind her of their inventory
cascades, experiments wounding up in chemical folklore and ambulance drives to a
publisher’s house, their minefield of ideas, vodka blizzards to rosaries in bowling balls - “My dear” he said one evening to her, the news of their first born a stinging message in
the air, he stared at her like she was the embalment of his daughter, he saw the future in
her, her eyes beating the images of his next life, her hands holding the room of their
family portraits, him and her and their light glorious in his eyes, family potently powerful
in love; But that love is potent, that a father’s constant life and love could melt into a
river in the heart of shatters, a storehouse of memory so ancient, its scrolls rusted from
beauty
- How could she know the man she married , the father of her child, the keeper of her
miscarriaged heart, the soulful laughter that welcomed her home after a long day of
service, tasted her bile for ripening, knew her waking hours to glorify the absence of
their abacus memories, memories that cloud the air and fail to latch onto their soulless
minds, a mind grown into the love offered by man who was a husband but then grew
into the very man he’d sworn to never become, who treated his wife the way his heart
broke to, whose notes now rang ringlets of trembles, each step the sindhoor of her
fades away and he stares away from his life, lost in the alleyway that presents himself
now
Her father is gone, the maestro who taught her poetry has faded into the rust of his
books, his imprints have been translated into motherboard of her forgotten memories,
His eyeroll that crept over her and her mother over the years, his jeer and insecurity now
overshadowed her thoughts, his actions written on hieroglyphs of their portrait, the
frames of gold and black tarnished, the man looking down no longer holding his
reflection.
The sunlight draws into my eyes, a blank canvas for what she is about to show me, my
eyelashes, signing my cheekbones with an anticipatory audience, but she is alone,
I am alone.
Encompassed alone in the nightmare winter is her beauty, bringing death to her knees is
her sunset, the cries of rain that litter her enemy’s cheeks, shadows of a game of tetris
she enjoyed
Silhouetted in the glass-fitting of the moon is she in Cinderella
Gliding along the sculpture of an eric is she in the little mermaid
The hollow trees with the spirit of the ancestral forest is she in pocahontas
The rose whose sister was picked by the beast is she in beauty and the Beast
Darkened eyelashes never belong to anyone but the wearer
The bookmark shall hold most of the heart of the maker
Why should she border herself because of a societal requirement
The skies never sailed for a duo, it was an individualist loner in the middle of a platinum
sky
Like a john wick villainess whose mind led men be feared by
Like the Syrian snake who chased away a religion to the fiery fruits associated with a
harlot
She’s everything the world never saw fit, like the first spark offered by the cigarette as its
fumes camouflage your sadness just to burn out heartstrings a second later
Her pearly ringlets of hair sway from her temples to across her lashes, like the latch of
lust in the initial encounter of arms playing sonnets and eyes entwined in matrimonial
vows, each lost in the mirage of emotions within as they longingly inch closer as the
frost beneath sizzles into fire, and the sharp intake of breaths hitches to a halt, a world
of parrots and doves climb out,
To be lost in the ecstacy of one and another, with screams that terrify the night and
soundless moans that collapse into a collision of aphrodisia, with each other being the
delight and pain, each body being drenched in sweat and seeds of Persephone’s stay in
the underworld
The world shifts into a glimmering fog, of charring oneself with the rust of an old photo
frame, with memories to comets soaring past the yellow sky
In a world of blood and mud she became their wine
In a prison of symmetry and infidelity she became a crossword
And in the mornings of glitter and maksath she became the black and white chessboard
Her bangles now gleamed silver in the sunlight, ivory etchings decorated her vision
She is the queen on the checkerboard
She is rewriting on the rosary
She is the air that breathes your sight upon blowing the conch
She is the pause between fear and a new moment
The etching on a Shakespearean book bind
Contested by her face it moves switching from emotion to power
In her hand the hourglass tips into mercenaries
Each grain of sand an entry of a nightmare
Each cry of a child the laughter of a cliffhanger
Each hollow heart a welcome for her residence
Intelligence so forth and wise like the mermaid on winters eve
Dives into a state of emergency, absorbing each emotion by logic and detaching from
her pillar to the darkness
I walk free shambles burning away my skin to a void empty by detachment and hollow
by mystique
Prudence and Cowardice go hand in hand one for a queen’s power and the other her
brocade
For it was never the subjects who she wanted to rule
Why fill the coastline where I can deprive myself to perfection
Why fulfill the burning desire between me and him when I can succumb to the frostbite
and destined solitude
Why protect the flame when I burn the incandescent ice as my crown
My crown is heavy with the seams of my endeavours, my head crowned bloodless with
the ember of anklets, copper with the taste of my own
I look up to the heavens, their cloudy majesty draws sunsets across my pleats
My anklets drown in their beats
Each mudra flows through my blood
My head feels throughout the evening of pictures and emotions of my fortitude
My sweat sinks down like the pearls of a necklace so brittle by its value and seemed
priceless by its nature
Like bloodmoney valuable only to the wicked and not to the poor
I am a writer and poet who publishes her works of poetry on my Instagram handle @crimsonliesandunmarkedstars. I have completed seventeen years living on this planet. I live in the Emirate of Dubai of the United Arab Emirates. I engage my time in reading; I specialize in gothic literature, fantasy, and fiction. I like to thrift clothes to reduce my role in capitalism and adore writing poetry in the raven’s hours of the night. I also am an Indian and love incorporating my culture into my poetry and plan to establish representation for South-Indian WOC in the Literary World.
Short Bio about Selene
Follow her on Social Media
Selene Vina – Instagram
Fracture – May 2023
The small things in life that marks us in specific ways, the experiences that makes us who we are by breaking and restructuring inner ourselves.
