I cut my finger, the sanguine smell
Permeates the air like petrichor.
The blood flows slow like caramel
Delighting in its long encore.
My clothes wear me like gossamer,
And I choke the sea with my bare hands.
They ask me which would I prefer:
Hell, high water, or wonderland.
My loneliness is fast renewed,
The poisoned air perfumed with death.
Like a hummingbird, I crave solitude
And in seven minutes I take seven breaths.
I hear my heart beat like a lullaby
That ticks away its lifelong debt.
A sound that subtly signifies
Each epoch until the next sunset.
The red sun is my paragon,
Both somber and ephemeral.
It sinks into oblivion
Like flowers yielding to my cull.
This world loves pandemonium,
In everything I see dysphoria.
Like Novocain my thoughts go numb—
And this is my euphoria.
Gabriella Miller has a BA in English Literature from the University of Vermont. She is an avid reader and writer, and lives in Vermont with her parents and two cats.
Sestina for my Father
My father could make a concentration camp into a game, but the game would be his own calamitous mood swings. Dining room table pontifications, tantrums, and smashing things, then saying he wanted to live on a boat on the open sea. Unshaven, finally free.
The Intellectuals and the Masses Revisited
With the advent of the modern industrial world, the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new generation of elite literati whose movement, dubbed “Modernism,” largely developed as a reaction to the emergence of a new technologically transformed world. This new literary intelligentsia would adopt a new aesthetic largely inspired by the conviction that the rapidly changing economic, social and political conditions unleashed by modern industrial society and technological progress posed an existential threat to the “traditional” order of European civilization.
This poem is absolutely impeccable! It begins with a delightful callback to Sylvia Plath and her “Cut” poem. Despite my admiration of Plath’s work, I can honestly say that I think this poem is far better than “Cut”. Ms. Miller maintains an impressive amount of control throughout this emotive piece, and she creates wonderfully bold imagery with great skill. Thank you, David, for giving such a fine piece some well-deserved exposure.
The debt to Sylvia Plath is perhaps a bit too obvious. But otherwise the poem is well-crafted and at least not as hysterical as her predecessor sometimes tended to be. Instead it comes across as a cool appraisal of a difficult situation. Emotion recollected in tranquillity rather than tranquillity recollected in emotion. Which is as it should be.