Verdad Magazine Volume 27
Fall 2019, Volume 27
Poetry by Ariel Machell
The Night Bulging with the Unsaid Said
Over the phone, I could lie
sweetly to my mind’s
eye, picture you whole
and in slippers on the couch,
mint tea with a whisper
of cream, dance of orchids
and lighthouses along
the walls, other garage
sale finds, placards that read:
“AT THE BEACH WE DO BEER-
THIRTY AND WINE-O-CLOCK.”
Seeing you is another story,
baby bird down, mascara clinging
to four lashes, and you say,
“Look: my nails are all falling off,
you know how I prided my feet,”
and I say “They’ll grow back,”
and you nod, say “I’m not bothering
with the wigs” and I wonder
if it’s because of your mother,
then wonder if it’s because everything
is because of mine.
Now the night is bulging
with the unsaid said, both
of them settling between us,
bruising their way into
the lamplight, and I’m pretending
this new picture of them
(flawed in all the familiar ways)
doesn’t hurt me, and you
pretend I already knew,
that I’m not discovering them
for the first time.
“You know how they were,”
you say, as if sharing a secret,
and I think: you can make
a wish on anything. I do
with the cat whisker blossoming
from the couch cushion, twirl it
between my fingers and blow,
watch it flutter to the wood floor,
the prickling remnants of the wish
already cooling. “Yes,” I say, and
“Do you want some more tea?”
and “Can you keep anything
else down?” and you say
“I’m not hungry."
Jag-wire
The first time I imagined my own death I was
playing hangman with my mother. The word
was “jaguar” after the plushie I’d cruelly
given a haircut the morning before, its fur
standing up in horrible tufts, bald chunks
scattered amongst the spots across its hide.
It sat ugly and gargoyled on the coffee table,
leering at the steady build-up of body parts
beneath the makeshift noose. I had successfully
guessed “u” “a” and “r” but I was never meant
to win, clinging as I did to the conviction that words
should sound the way they’re spelled. No,
the other way around. The shadow of a tractor
in a wheat field. Paper all over the floor from hours
of playing. My mother leaning in to draw the last
foot-as-oval. What a strange game it is to play
with a child—assembly of shapes and lines morphing
into anatomy and first death: full-bodied
and stiff at the end of a blue-crayon-rope,
the letters at my feet, my mother looking on.
BIO: Ariel Machell is a poet from California. She earned her BA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where she received the Gene and Etta Silverman award in poetry. She is a first year MFA-candidate at the University of Oregon. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in Gravel, Landlocked, and Up the Staircase Quarterly.