Spotlight: Chameleon / The Most Beautiful Thing / Uni-Love
Chameleon
I’ve found you
Imposter
Erect against the araceae backdrop
Stealing your neighbour’s hue
Garbed in flowers of false truth
Yesterday I thought you were a rock
Stoic in potent iron, even as my belly
Slipped over your scales
You beg the sun for her gold
The stones for their silver
The dirt for his muddy brown
The leaves for their tangerine
Shapeshifter
Scurrying through life with a colorful shield
Now, veiled
In yellow leaf-veins
Branching down your back
to the emerald stem of a tail
Feet inch deep in bough’s brown
Your guise dismays
Your buggy black eyes
Wearing no second-hand color
Naked in fear, defeat, regret
You cannot change the color
Of your destiny
The Most Beautiful Thing (Two Cups of Tea)
Mother
Hunched in an elegant bridge
Gallops of tangerine hair
Sweep the kitchen counter
Sunrise, the sky
Is grey dancing with
Soft amber, brilliant carmine
Waltzing into her
Liberated hands
Freeing one, two
Tablespoons:
Leafs of obsidian glow
Rests into my favourite
Purple cup, her favourite red
The kettle whines, she carries
It off the sienna flame
Gracefully decants a river
The leafs plump, release ecru
Steam pirouettes midair
Carefully, she lays the cups on the table
Checks her watch, sits down, and waits
For me to find
Her and two cups of tea
Not knowing that I am
Already here
Uni-love
We are lonely drunk vessels
blindly,
finding each other
in the dim library light
We thrust our hands, gape our mouths, stab our tongues, and let
Our gender emblems defile each other
Clumsily, senselessly, in a sea what-is-that unpleasantness.
Discovering what we’re made of
In kindred inebriation
We swap
Partners or positions or
Pink body parts
All in an effort to achieve
A believable rhythm of delight
eventually we will forget
names, faces, earnest promises,
foreplay, and afterglow
None of the dinner by candelight
We might imagine
The intimate glances
The talk until dawn
as soon as they’re gone we sit alone,
eating cold spaghetti from a can,
detach ourselves from
another emotionless encounter.
i find remnants of your faceless lovers
beside your unmade bed:
Empty condom wrappers.
An ashtray with butts
From their lips squished
By their thumbs buried in ashes
in your white-walled, smoke-filled, dirty-laundry strewn dorm room
That I find myself coming back to again and again
For no other reason I can think of
Than that you desire to have me in it.
Carly Breault is a second-year psychology student at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, BC, Canada.
