Do You Even Consider What You Buy Anymore
You buy the aspect of surprise. You buy
because the form and structure of the house
is unchanging and all that lies inside
remains as always was. You buy a box.
You buy the flatness, the smoothness, the dark
ink printed on the cardboard, the logo,
and what’s inside is guaranteed to be—
and the surprise of it perched by the door.
You don’t remember what you bought.
Let’s discover the contents: sticks of smoky incense,
sharp crystals, beads of each color
on black thread, gold-chained necklace
of lapis lazuli that you gave me
(it fell from around your neck—a defect),
a carved image of a rose in quartz
with a sticker stuck to the back
with Instagram and Facebook tags.
Behind you I clutch my new talisman of blue
flecked with dancing pyrite glances of gold:
a stone of the throat silenced. How has it gotten
to be here? Cut, chained, bagged, sent
to strangers, handled by a million hands,
still longing to drop back to the Earth.
Painted Dragon
I was getting one last look at the nursery paintings before I painted over them blue. My favorite of the bunch was a red dragon that hovered by a fairy tree, coiling serpentine with flames dancing round its forked tongue. I ran my hand over the red paint, brush strokes set over white like the roots of a tree poking from the ground. And I noticed something I never had before: beneath the tip of the dragon’s wing, a lead trail curled around. It was the painting’s outline. For the first time I saw my mother with her swollen belly sitting beside her brother’s wife, who lifted a hand to this very wall, leaned her elbow against it, and sketched out the tip of the dragon’s wing.
A week later I slew that thing in one wide sweep of blue.
Rene Seledotis (he/him) is a writer from the Metro-Detroit area. He earned his BA in creative writing at Oakland University, served on the Oakland Arts Review, and later started his own literary journal, 25:05 Magazine. His work has seen publication in Turtle Way Journal and Variety Pack.
The Marbled Sigh 