Responses to Dream Girls by Camille Roy (Belladonna* Chaplet #2)
Amanda Bylone’s Responses to Dream Girls by Camille Roy (Belladonna* Chaplet #2)
Marfa
My man is a product of streets veiled in moss
and roads veiled in dust,
Whose face soft gold, I'll endlessly adore
Eyes akin to
apple moonshine, a sip of home's sweet blend
A tapestry we'll weave, Proud,
he stands, with love
for kin, nurtured on lichen covered lanes
Dusty roads his playground, where
dreams and realities cleave
Rough hands, yet tender, his touch,
a tender refrain.
He kisses me
like he is me,
his soul's devotion true,
Not solely for I,
but for the Divine above
January 20th
I wore this skirt when you spilled coffee on it
I remember when I put it on
a beige mini skirt with white piping I asked
“Have I worn this with you yet?”
“No…actually wait you may have”
As you wore the same wrinkled shirt
that you had been wearing the past three days
Repulsion 1965
When i was younger i chased a boy i liked
around a soccer complex
I also used to chase him
around the playground at recess
I have this fear that a lover will kill me in my sleep
While i'm dreaming
stabbing me with a knife
Or plunge me in the head with a hammer
Like that doctor who murdered his wife on Glendower Place
Once I went to a party and wrote a memo in my phone
of all the movies a guy recommended me
I watched one of them two months later
it was the worst movie I ever saw
The female protagonist's breasts were popping out of her shirt
every other shot
and the only words she spoke were quirky one liners
reminiscent of Eva green’s character in the Dreamers
LA Swan Song
Lost cherry her vanilla and vetiver
honeyed apricot and cinnamon
Cardamom rice and lime
All the lipstick lips curled and curlers and butter and flour
Sugary cocktails swirling and hair rollers
Restaurants wool paneling and red booths
murder mystery trilogy ill fated lives
lovers’ lies
you don’t have to prove it to your parents
you’ll never leave this town
so I have to
Saint Lucy
I met an angel on the train holding a script like a lifeline on the boulevard
In the realm of their hearts with veils so thin her amber liquid flows
Cocktails with cheap yuzu and elderflower syrup
weaving through the conversations
and the chime of glasses, fusing enchantment and disillusionment
a symphony of contradictions amid smoky streets
where dreams bleed with fractured screens.
under the pavilion at the park we saw a shooting star
time stands still, idleness atrophies
with one foot in before the collapse.
Rosemary, ivory, jacaranda
Marigold, the sun’s shimmer at dawn
It’s no marvel my muses converged with the noise of the world
echoing a chaotic stream
of gnostic sects.
Here, I am composed
where the edges of reality and fantasy convene.
The light here, gleams with such intensity
that colors yield, and all is enveloped in immaculate white,
bleaching memories within its sphere,
the city's essence frozen in the lens of photographs.
Injections in her heart’s void
needles without dopamine and norepinephrine
Indifference in her gaze with passion dimmed
Or expressions of passion in disdain
But a dance of darkness emerges
the advent of her god both ordinary and boring
even as her prayers etched in lipstick on her mirror.
between voluntary and involuntary is a
spectrum of being drawn in and letting go
You want something you lack it
If you didn’t lack anything you wouldn't desire it
Nature doesn't lack, it creates because it possesses
And nothing means anything unless you let it.
But her agony finds no audience in this impossible world
And her voice a forgotten melody that once adorned the very air
I have seen mountains in real life
and I am pretty sure mountains are not real
when Solomon said
"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief"
he meant that knowledge is hell.
Too much understanding will kill something.
when Jeremiah said
“The harvest is past summer is over and we are not saved
He meant, “what hath god wrought, see what god has done.”
I was told I was too young to understand which thoughts were useless to me
And which thoughts’ threads weave purposeful strands.
And i can’t be a poet because to me poetry never ends
and i have a cavity that can only be filled by god
Perhaps other times exist that might possess greater beauty
yet the beauty of this instant is uniquely ours
