The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
Home: A collection of poems by Catalina Cano
Meadowlark
Home is the smell of brewing coffee
impregnating chipped brick walls,
the women cracking the eggs,
making sure the dogs are fed
and that
even the frequenting birds
receive their daily bread.
As the men continue to sleep,
I silence the juxtaposition
of the way the sun drops dead
at the realization that everything its warmth caresses
will one day die,
and the habit of using cupped hands
as ashtrays
on lazy Sunday afternoons.
I once dreamt I was a meadowlark
and I lingered over the emaciated backbone of my broken motherland;
all I know is
that I´ve never seen any of us asleep in public,
we´ve never really been able to
relax,
or decompress,
or let our guard down,
not when their famished hands
are bound to reach
and take
everything left behind,
unattended,
unwatched,
the way they did when
over five-hundred years ago
they told the remaining crowds
this land was theirs to take.
Deep-Rooted
My loneliness is an orchard full of rosary beads.
An intoxicated plantation of foul fruit
ready to nourish the insomniac dramaturge.
My loneliness is an egotistical proprietor.
An experienced kleptomaniac ready to take
that which the feeble can no longer disguise.
My loneliness enjoys performing inharmonious arias.
Raucous words and malicious truths
ready to implant themselves on tender skin.
My loneliness does not have a shelter to call its own.
It lurks among obsolete recollections
and blossoms underneath fractured spines.
My loneliness intonates anthems in a slurred speech.
Spellbinding and confining with unavoidable incantations
forever to linger like a hickory tree on an Autumn morning.
Blue Fountainhead
I know I flourished into this existence a month too early
just so I could step on premade train tracks
and yell at the approaching train to stop.
I know everything I had was blue,
blue crib, blue clothes, blue stroller, blue bedsheets too.
I know everything I have today remains blue,
blue heart, blue words, blue thoughts, blue songs to hum and sway to.
Home is the smell of coffee
seeping into blue-tinted walls and windowpanes
that slowly welcome the sun´s lethargic advancing warmth
for which migrating parrots wait on the branches of our garden´s pine trees.
Home is bubble-wrapped hearts
and small talk of the prosperous blue-red north everyone secretly wants
to encounter,
to obliviate,
to dissolve,
to welcome them home.
I was once told that us, humans, are the only animals
with the power to deny.
Then I remember that we have been denied
ever since they took everything they came to take,
leaving our blue lagoons empty bullet shells.
I suppose this is the result
of denying ourselves
for pleasure,
for pride,
for the idea of dissipating and merging into the better side.
