top of page
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. 

bottom of page