Poetry: Selections from Alise Versella

Cerebral by Nature

My father plays his life like a chess game

Four steps ahead to outmaneuver you

My sister beats him every time

Moves her queen to C4

They are the same, you see

Internally battling some demon unseen

 

I don’t have the patience for chess

Ransack the board with the quickest offense

I react first—like my mother

Deal with the consequence later

Or never

Denial looks most beautiful when all its pieces are spread out against the table

 

On this table, we hold no salt

We never look back long enough

To become pillar

Deflect with knight and castle, offer holy bishop casualty

A memory of my father so angry, he flipped the kitchen table

 

My mother broke every vase

We don’t hide our feelings inside ceramic anyway      

         

But it took forever to move every pawn across the board

And retrieve the pieces we had lost

 

She slapped my mouth once

And my teeth bit lip, drew from it

Blood

I ran through the street barefoot

 

A chess game can be as chaotic

Especially when played in my house

Each move becomes metaphor for underlying truths

There is no winner in a stalemate

But most times, one of us is simply holding out

The only lesson I’ve learned from chess

Has been how not to quit

For all our shit, never underestimate my family

We can play this game all day…we invented it.

Moths are Fragile, Turn to Dust Between Thumbs

I’ve lived a year of solitude in a century

Felt everything

At greater magnitude

Every plate in the cabinet crashing

 

You don’t understand the quake of these bones.

 

The flood of me

I’ve been attempting to hold back all day

My body the levee broken down by the wave

The soil of the watershed turning

 

To mud

All your sump-pump subterfuge

 

To convince me my ocean is wrong.

 

But salt turns kaleidoscope in the sun   my only refuge

The mountain range water creates on my face

 

I cry and cry and like Alice

I grow six feet tall a giantess I water the roots

What’s it mean that a daughter cries so easily and the world doesn’t?

 

I have been crying   my skeleton a constant state of fracture

Each hairline crack and fissure

Finally catching up

 

An ex once asked me why I like such sad songs

The sadness calms the silken moth

Wing raging

Raging against the light

It tries so hard to survive

 

In the dark

  

Where the wolves

Are always biting, biting

 

They hold my gold in their teeth

What I must let them keep

So I can turn from beast to insect

 

The single drop reflecting

The moon on the banana leaf.

Footprints

Consider this apology

We were bound to greed

Wanted oh so many things

But the foundation

Buckled

The mountains cleaved

It was our custom it would seem

To destroy everything

       But my God we thought we did it justly

 

Presently

You must be thinking

What price they must’ve spent

For renting rock

It literally crumbled

We were not strong enough to hold it up

 

Somehow the work continued

There are so many seashells

Coming up

From sand like bones dug up from graveyards

Proof of us

After the ravaging wave decimates shoreline

 

We existed

Footprints

 

Left by seagulls in sand

Make no sense

No clear directional path

 

And tire treads make this beach look like Mars

Perhaps

Earth became another planet

  

You think the bird had no future

Bound to ground and standing

Looking at the sun making cutlery of the coast

Maybe we did not simply turn to grain and dust

 

Maybe we lifted our salt-weary wings

To trust in a better universe

 

Those footprints zigzagging haphazardly

Prove the avian rocket readied itself for liftoff

Propelled itself to sky

 

I hope you find our feathers detached and left behind

Create a headdress out of them

Chief to a new tribe

 

Or perhaps a dream catcher

To hold what we lost

Dream beautifully of the memory of us

Nuclear Awe

The most beautiful place on our earthly home is Chernobyl

Flora and fauna not yet classified

Managed to fare well out of ruin

I think of this

Gazing at

The velvet carpet of night

How November rain Acidic

Is full of microbes you shouldn’t taste on your tongue

Yet I’m inclined to admit it’s beautiful

This soothing song of chemistry pouring out

From a beaker full of stars Test-tube musical

How adequately adaptable

The wolves of Chernobyl So immune to the radiation

Like they know some fact

We never knew

How to flourish where others view

Lost causes

How they come back.

Alise Versella is a Pushcart-nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society whose work has also been published in Academy of the Heart and Mind, Apricity Magazine, Circle Show, COG Magazine, The Courtship of Winds, Crack the Spine, DASH Literary Journal, El Portal, Elephant Journal, ellipsis...literature and art, Enclave, Entropy, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Grub Street, Loch Raven Review, Midwest Quarterly, Neologism Poetry Journal, The Opiate, Penumbra Literary and Art Journal, Poydras Review, Press Pause Press, The Rail, Soundings East, Ultraviolet Tribe, Umbrella Factory Magazine, What Rough Beast, Steam Ticket, Visitant, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. She has recently published a poetry collection When Wolves Become Birds (Golden Dragonfly Press) and was nominated for Sundress Pub’s 2021 Best of the Net award. Versella has worked with author Francesca Lia Block and Women’s Spiritual Poetry, whose latest anthology, Goddess: When She Rules, raised money for the Malala Fund. Kirkus has called her “…[A] boundlessly energetic and promising technician [who] crafts a unique blend of the symbolist and the confessional; a talented, promising newcomer.” She performs at local coffeehouses in Southern New Jersey and has taught poetry workshops at local libraries and schools.