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Paper Chrysalis
A collection of poetry and visual art by Brianna G. Reed
Institution Story
An Erasure Poem
Paper Wings
After Heather Cahoon
His as yours is a paper wing
un folding
seemingly suspended
amid catch and release:
You know his origami heart
quietly unfurling in fields
​
made paper burn
from pinecones to thistle
​
his white whaled wings finning
above you
​
his knife-edged neck cranes
skyward taking haphazard flight
from whispering reeds before turning
to you-
reciprocal retinas reveal
his as yours is a paper wing
​
un folding seemingly suspended
amid catch and release.
Paper Bombs, Paper Bridges
A blank page can play an important role; it can be a bridge. -Arthur Sze
The weekend has seen us all unfurl
into blank pages crumpling
one after another, catching flame mid-air,
a deck of cards catching matchstick flames.
Look outside I can prove it
snow-ash has cloaked a grey summer
as the emergence of spring,
chokes on amber cloud-edges.
My blank pages ache to overflow beyond my margins
to bleed black into blue to fill
whole journals when I am stumbling stupefied on apostrophes
caroming commas
& period pauses
smoldering in the furnace of my belly.
I’ll cut her right in her face she screams on paper / screens of paper fights like I am / a paper girl in a paper house / burning within long silences / lengthening like blankpage pauses lingering / a bursting dam that could extinguish / their wild mouth-fires / that I could never burn / their paper houses down / I could build them / when I have always wanted my words to flow like water from faucets never knowing I could / one day run out, despite desperate twisting wrists / to siphon my rivers
dry.
Blank pages can be a bridge I want to answer, taking aim, firing high.
They can be embers sparking perfectly in a touch of drought,
caressing desert underbrush in howling winds
giving rise to smokeblooms to mouths holding paper bombs.
Anesthesia
Break into my nervous system
soften sickle-sweet syringes
unwrap
me
as
I
sink
into convalescent
bone-bleached blankets
half-surgeon | half-witness.
Become morphine dripping
silicone slivered-tubes on skin
knowing
like
cloud-dust
you’ll
pour yourself in.
Pry nightfall from fingertips
like gauze-flowers unsticking
from suture-meshed
skin
first
bandage
then dress
will it hurt?
I want to ask yet can’t
before slipping away
tracheal trauma trembles
remembering how once, we were
two hawkmoths
powdering into
midnight air
coma
how, now, the wind stings
sharp as solvent,
now, even
medicine
tries
to taste
like you.
Brianna G Reed is the Diné author of various short stories and essays that have appeared within Leonardo and the Tribal College Journal. Raised in Hope Mills, North Carolina, she now studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts. You can listen to her current column, "Moccasin Millennial," serialized in podcasts at tribalcollegejournal.org.