| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** Author of the chapbook, "Stroking Castro's Beard," Patricia Gomes was named the First Place Winner in iVillage's Annual Poetry Slam in 2002 and 2003. She was awarded second Place in 2004. With her short stories and poems included in numerous anthologies, her recent works appear in Literary Potpourri, Shadow Keep Magazine, Dark Krypt, Poetry Super Highway, Unlikely Stories, and Scorched Earth. A member of the Massachusetts State Poetry Society and the Cape Cod Literary Press, her upcoming work will be published in Blue Fifth Review, Wolf Moon Press, and the inaugural issue (September 2005) of Lorraine and James' Global Urban Poetry.
Creator of the Octologue, an eight-line, syllabic form of poetry, Ms. Gomes performs throughout the New England area. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Adagio Verse Quarterly and an interviewer for Lily: An Online Literary Review. Her latest chapbook, Simple Truths and Coughing Things, co-authored with Michael Ladanyi, was published by Little Poem Press and released in March 2005. www.patriciagomes.com |
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| Christina's Apprehension |
| by Patricia Gomes |
| We carved patterns
in the window shades, ruining them for all time. Silliness in fairy silhouettes and ivied borders. Pretty contours, useless shapes, we watched the day pass through tulips cast upon the mildewed carpet and wrote a poem in seven rhyming parts on the Immaculate Conception. Innumerable cups of tea, your hands shook as you played Mother. Foreboding, palpable and as sharp as lemon slices left to shrivel on the saucer's edge, intensified as we squandered hour upon hour. I should have left much sooner, but could not leave you sitting cross-legged in stenciled sunlight. We peeled the hardened white glue from our fingertips, our prints preserved for your cigar box. Was that your idea? It was after that you extracted my vow, sunset-purple after that, while I cleaned your hands with ice water; your breath feverish and misguided, too close to my ear, you whispered, "Promise me, promise me we shall never, never, speak of the moon." |
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| Sept. 2005 |
| 47 |