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Tesserae

Poetry

by Ellora Sutton

do you remember a place called ephemera my veins are so fucking full of it. receipts I keep. choking on all the clinging on all the inability to let go, and yet I threw away that strip of photos where you kissed my cheek and I washed that cheek watched the carmine bleed away thought it meant / my hands are heavy have been so heavy ever since I haven’t held such bones again my palms reliquaries of ghosts and grief your knuckles ripe with bruising the black notes of the last piano Mozart kissed so full of genius the sounds holy shit and those photos that little strip I threw them away
and it was like tearing the marble monument of a dictator down like ripping pages out of history books or burning novels or a drip-feed amnesia because although I can’t remember the shape of your lips I’ll forever know the taste of your lipstick it rattles my teeth which have never been sharp but burning things, like stars blurry-soft and far away you were the biting but all that’s healed over now, I’d like to think when we took those photos they were iconography to be looked at through tendrils of incense and prayer inhale (exhale) inhale and the fog on the glass
ruptured with stories stolen away by the sun by the warmth of God (who exists between us) (us meaning our bodies) (we create Her) wiped away the lingerie of cathedral windows the beauty is made up of glass and lead and scabs and light smashed into millefiori into forgotten fruit dilating with rot into meat the mosaic will never be complete again.
Ellora Sutton

Ellora Sutton, 22, is a museum gift shop worker in Hampshire, United Kingdom. Her work has been published or is forthcoming by The Cardiff Review, Blue Marble Review, Eye Flash Poetry Journal, The Hellebore, Constellate Literary Journal, Lemon Star Mag, and others. She was commended in the 2018 Winchester Poetry Prize. 

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