Shishir 2018 Poems - Vanessa Croft Thompson

 

Flame

By Vanessa Croft Thompson

 

Since you have orchestrated my life, every love song is about you.
I feel you in the sultry grit of the jazz; its roughness is like yours.
The heat and fire of intensity
in the rise
and collapse
of the melody
Moving in linear fragments to create a pyre of pleasing dishonesty.
I would linger confined to these four walls with you until we both lie spent like a pile of ash.

Our tempo is a mixing of textures
like the curled film of rolling paper huddled against the shell of a time-smoothed calabash
my taut fragility against the crush of your frame is combustible.
I lie with you
in the night only when darkness shrouds us
in its veil of charring trickery.
Hiding the truth behind its smoke.
An accurate cover song to the burn of my soprano.

 

 

Vanessa Croft Thompson, born in US, resides in Anguilla. Her writing is often infused with issues of racial identity, cultural duality and the West Indian experience. Vanessa holds a B.Ed in Literature from the University of the West Indies and is currently reading for her Master of Arts in English Language. Several pieces of her poetry were published in the 2015 Anthology of Anguillian poetry, Where I See the Sun. A longtime winner of the Malliouhana Poetry Competition, she most recently captured first place with her spoken word poem “Hidden Opinions”. An avid supporter of the arts, Vanessa performed spoken word poetry at the Anguilla National Arts & Culture Awards as well as the Lit Fest fundraising event, An Evening with Dan Brown. Vanessa has been a featured presenter at the Anguilla Literary Festival in 2013, 2016 and 2017. In 2016, She currently heads the English Department at the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School in Anguilla, and tutors inmates at the Anguilla prison.

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