“Frankenstein, I love you”, “For Shilpa” and “Ash Wednesday”

“Frankenstein, I love you”, “For Shilpa” and “Ash Wednesday”

Three poems by Natalia Zvereva

Frankenstein, I love you


a foreboding sense of entitlement

washes over me like a tidal wave

i fashioned you out of porcelain

and rainwater

lush amounts of vigilance and melancholia

rhapsody and rapture

and the celestial balm of crisp lilac


skin lightly frosty to the touch

i have to be mindful

you are incarnate now

(but mostly, mortal)

searching for another tinge of backbone

in my cupboard

(but mostly, for myself)

i encounter a shriveled reminiscence

carpeted with dust

(but mostly, it's my old soul
retiring into the cobwebs)

and elsewhere

harbored deep in the palm trees

far away from my creation

is this solitary secret

that is my valiant glowing heart.

For Shilpa

salmon skinned Sufi sunflower sanctity

the honey in your incantation

soothes the raspiness in my lucidity

a solitary sterile silver needle

depositing carbon ash Sanskrit

deep below the facet of my skin

cradling your energy like a vehement pyre

my glacial untrained hands

are phosphorescent.

Ash Wednesday


cathedral charcoal

soot
dust

from a chimney

from the top of the house

that repentance built

i recall you telling me

the Strong must protect the Sweet


Father smudged it on


and how ferociously!

my forehead cracked open

That And

an epoch of damnation
came tumbling out

practicing Alchemist
fine-tuning my marrow
like a copper violin

from solid to liquid

i am now

a resting puddle
of aqua pura
at the foot of His vestment

all

this

because

you'll never buy me flowers

anymore.


i ask you

kindly

Not to giggle

at the condensation
i'm becoming

for i love you deeply

(while the sun is in my eyes)

About the Author

Natalia Zvereva

Natalia Zvereva came to New York City in 1992 as a refugee from the Soviet Union. She was raised in Queens and learned to speak English and Spanish by analyzing poems by Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Llorca. A professional actress for over a decade, she appears in the new season of Orange is the New Black.