Two Poems
by Naomi Borwein
Fireworks Erupted Under Her Eyes
Every night the small child lay down and closed her eyes,
to watch the red, yellow, white, and blue explosions:
snowflakes and falling leaves,
phosphene dahlia configurations
going off on the vast black horizon under her eyelids.
Squeezing tight, she focused on the farthest point,
folding at the skyline until unconsciousness siphoned her gently away.
Every night, she saw
sparks and spirals flashing, networks
fill the welkin
with the same anticipation of
New Year’s Eve on Citadel Hill glowing
chrysanthemums and comets darting across the hypaethral sky; as
teenagers set off Firecrackers in their back yards.
Slipping into bed every night, she watched the light behind her eyes dancing in what she liked to imagine was the end of the universe,
the unfathomable, phenomenological abyss.
She would push farther towards its edges until she passed out.
It happened gradually,
almost imperceptibly
that the pyrotechnics began to thin.
The child wondered if she had been too greedy
and used it up, like a battery.
By next summer the fireworks had all but disappeared.
The blackness under her eyes turning grey.
The brilliant flashes of colour, now black specks and sequences going off behind a scrim,
like an ambient death shroud.
And so she had the bedazzling idea that she would try to recharge her eyes.
She climbed up to the top of Citadel Hill and lay down in the thick carpet of ghost-like grass
fibre optic wires
fastened to her eyelids
and pulsing electricity
under the ‘saffron moon’
[beyond the exosphere]
until fireworks erupted from her eyes.
Ast(e)roidal Intelligence
On the egress
her arm made a crunching noise,
and cranked like a ham radio. Ssshhhh Eeeeee,
Shoulder straight, hinged.
Before hanging down by the side of her torso,
like some formless, alien object.
Cometary
amputation\
prosthetic/tentacle\
whooshing.
A high groaning creak,
pitch pin countersunk
at the knuckle of the joint.
The apparatus.
As metal ruts stapled back, and
folded in toward the grooves of
her [glowing] ribs.
[Exposed] white lines—anfractuous—
vermillion stitched veins interlacing
magenta bundles magnetic
twisting of the body
twisting
field vectors in the pitch
black viscous, expanse of dreams.
Dreams, the
chaotic shuffling of rooms and people
of buildings within buildings
roulette curves—curvatures and cusps—
of the dead visitations of faces, of limbs
phantom limbs of corridors spilling out
scorching steel arms, teal-scarlet flames,
clasped between
anaemic ivory fingers that
break out in soft
engorged sacs
and incubate the flesh
enveloped remains
serpiginous pieces
pierced fragments of
broken
satellites flecks
oneiric
[cometary] fall
down to earth
blistering [silicate] surfaces
gleam exquisitely,
beautifully
mangled in the process
of trying to exist.
BIO: Naomi Simone Borwein is a Pushcart-nominated poet and an academic. Some creative work appears in Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Space & Time Magazine, Lovecraftiana, HWA Poetry Showcase IX (featured poet), Ghost City Review, Superpresent Magazine, Suburban Witchcraft Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an editor in various guises. Naomi recently curated the volume Global Indigenous Horror for University Press of Mississippi. X: @borwein_ns. | Bluesky: @nsborwein.bsky.social