VALENTINA CANO

Inedible

A harvest of words
has brought us here.
Over-ripe,
their skins fizzing with scabs
that ooze,
the words swamp the air around us.
Our scythes, perched like birds
on our shoulders
tremble at the task ahead,
at the slaughter.
With a last look back
at our moments of tilling,
we trench in,
pulling our memories behind us,
our words,
our festering fruits,
before us.

Travels Through a Disorder

The yellow curtain swings with the wind,
an elongated egg yolk dancing beside me.
I lay on the couch,
my ribs sticking out like fork tines
and my feet cold and wet
with gardening water.
The world is flooded
and I am spread on it like a broken door,
floating bones for wood,
a sail made of skin.
I wind myself up
as the day comes to a close
like a nerve ending pinched flat.
I bury my head in the musk of the pillow
and dream of a supermarket on
Saturday mornings,
a hunger like a boiling pot at my center,
urging me on.

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals, A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling, Popshot, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Rem Magazine, Structo, The 22 Magazine, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Niteblade, Tuck Magazine, Ontologica, Congruent Spaces Magazine, Pipe Dream, Decades Review, Anatomy, Lowestof Chronicle, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lady Ink Magazine, White Masquerade Anthology and Perhaps I'm Wrong About the World. You can find her here: http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com