Talia Reed

Opera

a dreaming that keeps feeling, how tender
each pretend moment and I drink to you, Romeo.

in our own operas we see them in their
moments—sweating at the brow, in their eyes
sparkling, in the dark just before they are
overcome.

always we lay on this threshold;
our glittery flakes settled until we by chance,
are lifted and shaken.

You were saying, after the lights burn out
the white space is equal to the words.

We’re still sleeping in the last burial.
We still mistake the back of a
stranger’s head for his.

We’ve lost our sense of color; blood red poppy
or horror.

Schism

All of you misty ghosts
hover round, whispering
your opinions to my heart.

Hair sweeping the air.
Eyes glistening like opossums—
a spectacular toxic waste sight
sort of haunting night. 

Among the eerie hum
a sputtering and
a backdrop of American blight.

My fellow theatre props, I beg of you:
air out that tawdry
business of malodor.

And when I’ve built my empire,
when the dog’s belly is warm,
then let the hideous human
bust me all up and call it a schism. 

Through

Beneath those virulent sores you’re stranded.

then the baptismal waters throw
her under and then over all of it—

A sword goes after and consumes.

I try to place where the tangible
has to stop being the tangible,
where the universe ends and the
rotten remains get scraped away.

And where we’re not always being so thick
and beating out our furnace thoughts
and our hearts nailed to the wall;

when that was the time for that
I was her.
And I walked out, hair wet

and put on my old clothes.

Talia Reed is currently spending her final semester at Indiana University South Bend as a student-teacher in an American high school classroom teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Macbeth.  At IU South Bend Talia edited the 2007 literary magazine Analecta and currently writes book and art reviews for the student paper The Preface.  She has also recently been added to the reveiwing staff of MiPoesias Magazine.  Her poems have appeared in Wicked Alice, Main Street Rag, The Tusculum Review, and forthcoming from Avatar Review.