Smokescreen
- Jul 17, 2017
- 2 min read
by Nena Larieze
The first pairs of hands to touch her were neglectful, and so she became tarnished like a bucket left out in the rain. You could hear her hollow if you kicked it.
She loves to play cover up with concealer, and control, and success and her smile can win you over; she’s a good salesman for a woman, they told her, and so they believed.
Let’s say that no matter how blurry, the past’s fragments are still sewn into each and every article of this moment and let’s say she only makes wishes, with eyes open; let’s say she has secrets.
She was surrounded by hands, but they weren’t often clapping or snapping to the ebbs and flows of metaphor; let’s say sometimes they really were around her neck. Let’s say that they consumed her childhood and her trust and her sense of stability, like a wildfire that the news reported as out, but isn’t really.
Let’s say her wellbeing is palm oil and there are acres of rainforest to go, but it’s a slow burn.
Let’s say some would rather see those secrets engulfed with the girl so she can’t unearth the ugly.
Let’s say this girl is a woman now, but sometimes she doesn’t want to be touched. She doesn’t trust hands, folded neatly or fallen open in Savasana. She despises handshakes, but you hold her in the palm of your reality,
and there she feels rebuilt.
Let’s say she has truth for sale, as long as you don’t buy the infomercials of delusion, as long as your hands hover over her like helicopters.
As long as you reassure like a coast guard off the grid, and you remind her to take deep breaths like an EMT fielding damage control, except it’s not life or death, it’s night and day.
When the moonlight lights her skin aglow, don’t put her out; ignite her; play shadow puppets, tracing a new outline of synapses that don’t fire as rapid fire, so that the
embers will broadcast how brilliantly she shines beneath the hands she uses to shield out
any signs of flame.
Nena Larieze is an activistic, soap-boxy, mother-bearish, adventure-seeking, anxiety-ridden poet and educator. Her work has been featured and published in Poetry to Feed the Spirit and Love and other Passions, as well as university publications within the University of Central Florida and Valencia College. Her poetry has been featured at Queen Bean Coffee in Modesto, Calif., and Bad Ass Coffee in Orlando. She has a collection of poetry and nonfiction prose entitled Activistic, available on www.amazon.com, and posts poetry on www.nenalarieze.com. In between teaching and chasing after toddlers, she is working on drafting and obsessively editing a novel, a collection of short nonfiction, and poetry entitled The Sea Also Rises, Chronicles of a Broken Childhood, and On Maternity Leave: When Anxiety Meets Silence.
