Ramona Itule-Patigian: Three Poems

         

 

          A Short Dissertation

Sacred pathetic fallacy, here we are

bell and board, bound to brain.

The ghost trains and I searching lights

for more than lanterns. The library romantics

and microscope erotics came for columns and

they’ll leave with nothing less. So

let’s pretend we’re spies and apply band-aids

to flat tires. Let’s go wine tasting at the university

and fish shooting at the mall. Take

me shopping or bar hopping. Tell

the bartender you love Stein and

and we’ll toast Sartre, recite symphonies and

play Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.  

Read me gibberish, it’s sexy.

We’ll buy Che T-shirts and berets

as long as there’s an ATM

drink ink till we’re dizzy and bask in composition

I’ve tried baking cakes with tacks and hangers

and I like the sound of my own voice

                                 Apparition

Beginning to imagine my life with the apparition was not hard

starting over tea in a silent parlor

The two of us seated without the bolts of our waking lives

A memory rolls over again, takes a swift gusty inhale

and the cobwebbed body smiles a poker-face smile

Appears over the wire in a startling break, a lost bell tower

that once knew my heart like the map of a hand

Starting to embrace life with the apparition was easy too

beginning with a song on a crackling recorder

The two of us listening without the rolling static of traffic

The memory rises up with a dusty stifled murmur

and my call is finally answered in the death of the dead

At first just a speechless spell that stood and stuttered in silence

I lost my breath and swallowed my twisted stomach with a gulp

trying to find a greeting fit for a talking statue

Preparing to shatter glass, drain the embalmed and remember everything

Then a tumbling spindle, rattling and re-living in constant spilling threads

chattering on to the sound I had buried, to relic lighthouses and dinosaur bones

Now the ghost of a ghost

the apparition and I begin to make plans

                                   Bones

All our finely tuned legacies sprawl out from underneath

Like the swift, seared desert that first choked me into fantasy and form

All these scowling teenage girls I was and swift fits I hailed sacred

And yet I can hardly summon a line for you

Let alone any blazed battle fields or mourned loses

Those are mine to keep

Those that move like stillness and settle unnoticed

Those that bleed through paper like spirits and smoke

Those that have grown within my earth and calcify to bone

Any cliché that I could give you would seem blasphemy

Sold out, grown up, resigned individuality?

You waver like the fight in me

You pace there in the roots

Sifting sand and awakening dust

Reminiscent of angst, but more like rebel lust

Sometimes I forget I loved life first

Ramona Itule-Patigian is from the desert, but now lives in Berkeley, California with her boyfriend and cat. She recently received her MFA from Mills College and loves music and fruit. Her work has appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Quantum Poetry Magazine, and is forthcoming in Triggerfish Critical Review.