Two Poems by Elizabeth Sylvia

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Marie Antoinette remembers

✤

I ride

through my life

for the last time

thrown from the cell

of darkness

into the cold roar

of day

Noise

Noise

✤

They bring me

to the square

Open cart

signifying

my shame

The crowds

will have their fill

of me

who once

appeared to them

as a vision

I still welcome

the sun’s silent eye

✤

Death smells

only to the living

No more cut roses

in a bowl

No more child-

breath sweetening

my skin

My own death

the world’s

Rosé All Day Off Into the Sun

(after a tweet by @girl_recovery*)

When I get home from work Marie Antoinette is in the driveway

jingling her change purse of livres and gold Louis.

I can’t count her money and neither can she but while I was

ticking down the dollars at the job I know to be grateful for,

she was watching RH: Orange County, Atlanta, LA. Listen, Marie

knows we have it good here — she watches the laundry’s spinning magic

and we cut flowers in the million-year-old golden light,

but TV shows her refrigerators with glass doors that open on

a stationed corps of bottled water, chilled tumblers on the poolside patio.

Carpe drink ‘em! She wants rosé pink as a velvet hairbow,

sweet as her little daughter’s breath. Wine at the island is a telescope

lens of the immediate moment. All the anger is room-sized, all the targets

are in reach. Marie likes a pretty label, picks her bottles for a close-up

shot so she can guzzle Velvet Ribbon, Daughter Breath, Do not remind me

every day is a blister in this necklace of a lifetime.

*Mommy wine culture is a scam. It’s not cute. It’s another effective attempt to subdue or annihilate women. Rose all day off into the sun — @girl_recovery

Elizabeth Sylvia is the author of None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women, winner of the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Prize and a Small Press Distribution bestseller. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by DIAGRAM, 30 West, and Wolfson Press and her poems have been published in over 30 different literary magazines. She is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. elizabethsylviapoet.net