The Young poem in a backless dress poems by Laura Lamarca


She's just another cigarette burn on a corpse of curse and whim.

No motivation moves her defeat
where these creased sheets
lie limbless; here, where the
duvet drowns her in a white 
waterproof way, so even shit 
smears and wet legs cannot
heave her fat ass out. She is

burdened by streaks of day-
light, as its plight peeps through
blacked-out stains of yesterday.

The dust makes magic
with dirt, paving paths that split
odours of sweat and stale skin
in thickets of resentment stretched
across her house. Among chores

as monosyllabic as death, she must
make merry with the shapes of hate
that birth themselves between burnt
toast and cups of cold coffee, while
her eyelids fade with fifty shades
of depression. 

Ousted from the forgotten confines
of her warm farewells, those that 
berate her bones into disabled
dreams that fuck her future into single 
slots of 24 hour refrains...

she yearns to return there
so she might not live again.


Young poem in a backless dress.

She tacks moon-crooned songs to the inside of her sighs,
strumming sorrow between leaking lashes, 
that look down on her stone-built soul, 
so she can be micro-bodies of words without names, 
anchored to mastectomies 
by hung shoulders and her mammogram muse.

Her fear is fierce and shoots sparks—
those little orange daggers, that dare to settle along her cries. 
But she is stuttering again and the forty-something years 
she wearily wears
lie down like corpses in her fading hair.

She is burned wishes and bending headstones
that sing of regret in ancient cemeteries,
while doctors decide if geographical brilliance will bestow
her the beauty…of life.

Its enigma is enormous, she says, while you stitch stigmata
to my skin, in a suicide of seasons that pockmark
these absent breasts; I sit high
in sanity’s open-topped coffins while society
forces me to frame fat between my bones, and begs me
to break blames, like sacrificial bread
along a vertebra of my own voice

and all the while, this unblinking death prefers me
to be human
as I hum sonatas through the cruelty
of cancer’s callous aim.

I captured you Caernarfon, but we can't claw it back.

i.
I have crawled along castle walls for us,
grown beside you like the shiver to your fears--
your fading fears, becoming bright flames
amidst a season of my shadows,
but all the while, you've been welded 
to a whole web of lightning bolts
laced across my night skies,
climbing ruined rungs of life's ladder
without me, until all colour is gone
and I am phased back
into the nothingness between your exhales.

ii.
I am several small skulls
stitched tightly 
to surround your lack of conscience...

mere split hairs many moons long
that lie limply
across the ice-mountains of my cries.
Your retreating shoulders beat blame
like torrential rain inside goodbyes
and my thighs thrum ballads without you.

iii.
You have been the wheels that moved me--

those I love yous yelling life
into such terrible stains
while I rotated my spines
around an absence of blackmail:

I didn't pay you to make mud
with my ever-evolving earth, nor did I 
birth miracles 
from three decades of my wounds;
but still, you rolled down from my teeth
to tell of genuine worth.

iv.
You have made me untouchable again,
with universal agonies 
aerating from my sins...and everything
we caught together as cliché 
has revealed itself conditional--

when I bleed, you opt to be my past,
vampiring emotions
with the burning of words,
ones I struggled to believe in anyway...

because actions belied them
in every yellow light.

v.
I want infant incantations 
to inter themselves inside my sharks,
so veins can voice me gilded,
woven into incessant storms
we should never survive,
while I bewitch us both begotten 
along tainted turrets 
of this body's grieving ghosts.


© Laura Lamarca, All Rights Reserved. 

Laura Lamarca is a 48-year old professional poet who currently resides in Brighton and Hove, UK. She’s the author of 5 books of poetry, including a series titled “Memoirs of a Messed-Up Mum” published by Close to the Bone Publications. Lamarca is a psychic medium, Demonologist and Modern Exorcist who now writes poetry in her spare time. She says that poetry is her “exhale” and a means to release pent-up emotions in a safe and sustainable way.

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