JADE RIORDAN is a poet from the land of the midnight sun. Her poetry has appeared in Augur Magazine, CV2, Grain, The Malahat Review, Room, Vallum, and elsewhere.
Translucence can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 6.2.
Translucence
Jade Riordan
TRANSLUCENCE
by Jade Riordan
Content warning: mentions of death
Something sturdier than this way of living:
teeth crowned with velvet or the architecture
of clouds or some other form of forgetting.
A lonely day is a fragile alchemy: the transmutation
of conversations into catkins. I yawn in pastels,
fleeting and soft as tomorrow could be.
Before I die, I want to soften across the years
of a certain someone’s memory. I would like
to extract honey from a honeycomb, too.
Even small dreams deserve to be offered daylight.
It keeps the cave paintings left by imagination on
the inner, thought-side of our skulls fresh. In my head,
daylight returns, pale blue, the way the sky
would look if it was translucent and I could see us
through the hard days. And through the window,
I see the lonely world and the inhabitants of clouds
and handprints painted in honey.
Every poem is simply humanity building
and rebuilding our bones from velvet and the language
of imagination. I want to converse using a paintbrush
made of catkins. I would like to ask your name.
