Ghazal For All The Hungry Creatures
Wrack filled girl. Rare as embered lake the poet mistakes for golden boat.
How will the moon remember us, here, where we are eons old beholden boat?
Every day the cloud folds in on its own longing. Water scattered piecemeal,
Mana broken on the mouths of grass. The sun sings it back to swollen boat.
Like something noxious enough to wear the face of flowers you are arming
Your cheeks with poppies. You think, this is the most beautiful way to be a stolen boat.
Somedays you are an armada ravaged on the rocks of your own grief. Doubloon oath
That takes hold with every severed lock. To be pirate and plunder. Bold and boat.
One day you will crack the water with dessert spoon. One day, Bianca, you will
Swallow this surrogate hunger. It will be your stave, omen, boat.
Bianca Braswell is a Cuban-American poet currently enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she is studying English and Film studies. She has previously been published in Stark poetry journal and has work forthcoming in Mineral Lit Magazine. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.