BY NICOLE YURCABA
One’s Being Reflected In An Autumn Night
One molds to the fog, then leaks drop by drop from the skeleton branch that stretches through the gray camphor. One’s soul exhumes from the body’s shell.
The world, a torrent of darkness, stretches one’s ability to venture to the light, and one is vacuumed up and demolished by an invisible black hole; one is sucked into a wormhole, flattened, crushed, compressed into a thin paper that disintegrates in the dampness.
The sky, a rumpled sheet of black milk unlined by any glimmer. There is no gold; there are no sun rays; the gray hues replace the blacks of one’s pupils. And, since the cliché states that one’s eyes are the windows to one’s souls, when one sees his or her eyes mirrored in the trickling glass of an inked stream, one finds that he or she is metallic. One’s being is smelted and sheathed and emanates silver’s sheer cold. One’s blood flows Siberian, and one rises from the tundra in a veil after the sun meets the permafrost.
At some point, one’s blackened pieces rejoin the medley, and one rejoins the air, becomes dissolved. One more dismal absolute in a world that exudes and extorts nothingness.
The frost lies on the horizon, and the frost becomes one’s clung-to hope. One dreams of being pristinely frozen, exquisitely crystallized on deciduous leaves and coniferous needles until the time arrives in the form of warm dawn, and one may thaw and slink through the cracks, through the intricacies of the bark residing on the anorexic limb that stretches its finger forward like an ancient god’s eternality.
Nicole Yurcaba, an Instructor of English at Bridgewater College, is an amalgam of otherness: a poet, an essayist, a goth (yes, with a lowercase “g,” a Ukrainian-American. In an effort to dispel negative stereotypes of goths and other subculture members, Yurcaba’s poetry often focuses on subculture aesthetic, Slavic mythology and culture, death positive aesthetics, and landscapes. Her poems have appeared in such places as The Atlanta Review, Chariton Review, West Trade Review, The Lindenwood Review, Artemis, and many other online and print journals.