Painting by Maria Boohtiyarova

You created me

from images long lost;

moving my body

across untouchable seas;

there was little to fear.

Maybe the verses

of my transfixed dreams.

Maybe the blurred screen.

Something had to be given

for so little asked.

It wasn't necessary to feel

my heart in between my legs.

You - the impossible elegy

spiraling down my poems.

When I hid behind

the frosted flowers,

I don't know whether

it was for you or me.

Your blind hand reached

my limitations and

I craved for more

but you shall never understand

why I liked to be in captivity

when nothing could

be offered apart from

my naked words,

my strangled confession

of admiration.

I am mapping

fate. The knowledge

of surfaces will never be enough

to know me.

You touched me with

your mind. I touched you

with my distant flesh.

There is no loss.

The end still sleeps within us.

Karla Bardanza

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2012

Painting by Yoko Tanji

Yesterday my past I drew

on a canvas of silence and torment

when the Moon was so blue.

What happened? What did fate do?

Life only taught me to lament.

Yesterday my past I drew.

If I could only have a clue,

despair wouldn't be my scent

when the Moon was so blue.

Tears stained my night's dew

and the stars cried without my consent.

Yesterday my past I drew.

Sadness is nothing but a tender tattoo,

an unforgettable mark I did invent

when the Moon was so blue.

What I feel, somebody feels too.

I need some time to be content.

Yesterday my past I drew

when the Moon was so blue.

Karla Bardanza

Villanelle

A Villanelle is a nineteen-line poem consisting of a very specific rhyming scheme:

aba aba aba aba aba abaa.

The first and the third lines in the first stanza are repeated in alternating order throughout the

poem, and appear together in the last couplet (last two lines).

Copyright©Karla Bardanza 2012

I flew toward love before my heart was aware.

My urge stained those nights as deep chasms

sang 'neath the moon.

I was ouside life.

Rays of your soul shone through my skin,

embroidering feelings, knitting heavens,

tracing my book of prophecies and myths.

Only time was alert.

Only time kept its eyes open.

Multifoliated red roses blossomed in muddy

valleys deep inside. Cactus flowers dreamed

about us behind my breathless hills of desire.

Passion purified me.

It was time of trampled lillies.

When my doomed heart finally wept,

I was writing my testament of pain and regrets.

The air was frosty and dead.

I couldn't clear the rusty tops of my grief.

I couldn't read your metaphors or see

your undiscovered face and infinity.

I couldn't.

Karla Bardanza

When he took the meaning out of things,

she embraced the religion of sadness.

When he closed his dictionary of emotions,

she thought there was something wrong

with her body. Maybe she was getting fat

or something like that.

She used to search for her own imperfections

as he opened the morning paper silently almost

every day.

She blamed herself for the sudden changes.

One day she bent with the burden of his indifference.

-but it was just one day-

Then she got used to her white existence.

She imagined herself as tree that was pruned by a skilled gardener.

A beautiful tree that could have grown ninety feet tall or more on the

side of a mountain.

But somehow she was a just small domestic tree now.

She cried.

It was autumn again in her heart.

Karla Bardanza