Two Poems by Elizabeth Sylvia
Updated: Dec 13, 2022
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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