Scarlet Screams

By Berlin Burke

From her first publication Tangerine Dreams, the author continues to explore the demimonde between a fiction of fantasy and simplified reality, using poetry and prose as a cathartic expression to conjure the reader's inner recesses and repressed lexes. She explores contemporary and novel themes ranging from obsession to domestic vi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tamarind Hill Press
• Release date: Nov 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644673300

Book preview

STRANGE FOG

…

I am a strange fog rolling countryside nights, always trailing her dying stars.

My hands are but playthings in the melancholy of my spirit grass.

My feet wedge themselves in quagmire-fire and dance in conjunctions from your lips.

Would that I could live like I write.

Brave.

Proud.

Strong.

Grief is, however, a strange delight.

It comes at me from all angles.

Drapes its sticky Sudarium over crisscross pattern of my thoughts.

For I am the shroud of Turin, cursed to carry your imprint as an x-ray of flesh forever weeping your name.

ROOM 49

…

My fingers know the arcs of your flesh.

They trace your contours and inhale your perfections - your imperfections - the small patch of hair on the crevice of your spine; downy and real between the apertures of your skin.

I trace the lay lines of your body, like many a woman before me; yet my abundance erases the cellular memory of their skin, and condemns their mundane touch to the exquisite chasm of forgetting.

I am addicted to your smell,

beholden to the dampness of scent emanating from the compact frame of your chest.

In your arms, I feel like a coiled snake, wrapped around you, gulping your wine through my flesh.

I navigate your silhouette with parched hands delving for water in the shell of your body.

Your cartography embeds into my skin. It traces, yearning deep into my tissue; my sinew taught against your dells and summits.

In the eternity of this moment, my mind revolts.

Its revulsion to you is primal, divested.

Its hatred is real and palpable, like fog rolling over the banks of a Loch on a grey Scottish night.

I want to rally against you.

The logical, linear part of me screams to push you away, to force your hands from my hips, to banish the rapid beating of your heart, to repel the faint rasp of your breath painting portraits onto my neck.

And yet, draped around you, I cannot speak, I cannot connect my mind to the response of my body.

Like a conch-shell forever cursed to carry the sound of the ocean within it,

I am filled with you,

my mouth tastes you and repeats your drone,

over and over,

as the ocean pouring itself,

second after second, onto the parched coarseness of sand

…taking parts with it and returning them to the depth of darkness,

content in the knowledge that it may, one day, spew them back out into the light,

…a particle of sand alone in a sea of atoms.

Automatism is the reaction of a body in a moment of unknowing. Surely no fault can assign to those acting on the instinct of the body; those who create consequence through involuntary action. How I wish I could claim the same defence.

Present my case before a Crown and receive the mercy of automatic response.

I cannot control the way I respond to you.

The way my mind and flesh are in direct conflict and yet it feels as though I stand outside myself and watch as