Kimberly Madura

For Wendy

Watching over you
in room 4060
on curve 25.
Let’s get some air.
Primal cries set against
a backdrop of
sea lavender and purple roses.
Standing by your side in
midnight gardens
at the grave.
I got to hold you
in your pain.
Baby keep your head up.
I’m reaching for your hand,
until the end.

The castle doors were purple.
Walk through the rooms of
endless echoes
and Shakespearean stages.
Take a turn on the carousel.

Alas,
a medieval dagger to
the heart.
We are still
quite primitive, aren’t we.
So much depends on those
elements of betrayal.

Beware,
Lady Macbeths are everywhere
these days.

On that night
Against the backdrop
of a star-lit dazzling
ink blue sky

Gazing into the
consuming effulgence
of your evocative caramel eyes

On that night
this
is how I remember love.

Soon, we will go to the desert,
that orange desert
and stand on those crimson dunes,
melt into the cherry rust sand –
surrounded by burnt dust and scorching gold sun

Sand and bone, our bones –
unbroken and elemental
fusing into the soft curves and
clean shape of the chili red quicksilver below

We will drink whiskey from the canteen
and dance the Polonaise from memory,
make primal screams of rapture,
and of bliss

When we get there it
will be worth everything
to have survived –
it will all boil down to this

– just this moment.

sunflowers the color of bees
seen with your eyes
wide open,
green eyes, green they
made you uneasy, I
changed them to
blue
but baby don’t
you make
my brown eyes –

space, wide open
and silence
seen but not heard
then suddenly not seen
don’t come knocking
I’m not home anymore
close your eyes
check the
garden, out back
beneath the

sunflowers

and doesn’t it sting, shhhh

The pink kite against the purple sky –
free to fall, under the weight
of time and yet still floating up on
the buoyancy of love (and oxygen)
gravity – bringing me down.
And you understand me incompletely

I know no one
and no one really knows me
and in that I am free –

I want you to know me
but you don’t know me
and in that I am trapped –

shifting back and forth
back and forth on this see-saw
across time, apart
never really making progress –

my world and theirs
my world always so different from theirs
them me
them me –

now tell me, why do you want to be free?

Up the broken steps,
between the vodka and the tears,
crying washed out the truths.
We got lost somewhere between
the past and the present.

Somewhere between when those
clear tells fell and the crystal vodka
turned to red blood,
was the trust you needed,
was the truth I wanted.

When the colors swirl on a moment
preserving a thought, marking a place in time
a piece of life, that freedom in form
caught on one piece of paper
edited to contrast
an image, color, creating a perfect moment then
a perfect thing now
forever captured for me to hold onto
each paper aligns with one concrete memory
ageless and preserved
how the colors appear and fill in this moment
of my mind, my eyes, transient human reality
embossed, glossed, matted into something tangible
even while not truly understanding how that works
I am in awe of the mystery of it
mysterious proof of life
proof in my hand / proof I can hold
that then I lived.

We call this liminality,
this space that it is possible to stay in too long
this space that it is possible to never come out of.
But there was a before and there will be an after
Now the clamped hold, the compression, middle
pressure
we call this transition, in transition
we change
holding until/holding on
until the time when we run out of breath
until we turn blue
until we rise to the surface or sink down
like a drowning
fear can be a good motivator
be it of life or of death
Liminality is
Blue
I have decided to leave (live)
to go but not to let go.
I hold on, waiting for the next thing
hoping it will come and when it does
I fool myself into thinking I knew it would all the time,
when the truth is,
I had no idea
After all, it doesn’t always come for everyone,
isn’t that right Virginia?