POETRY
Failure to Resist
pink frosting, hollow cake,
gold wallpaper with repeated pattern
of a tooth, breaking.
i want the vulnerability
of a houseplant, to lose myself
in a confined space.
every morning i smile
at my sheer curtains
& feel algo in me stretch
to the edge of my skin.
i am a poisoned treat,
a sharp knife in the jam.
i am the blood sister
of every precipice.
i would look better
as a head on the mantel
than walking out the door.
Lucent
tint myself transparent & hide
there, glitter every bone
in my body
there are still undiscovered countries
but their governments are failing
in japan scientists have turned
the meat of the brain
“into a glassy, see-through substance”
they hope will help
surgeons identify disease
by replacing substance
with a deliberate hole
hope is a disease of the meat
i would like to identify & remove it
in the video game everything
of a certain color is a clue
to investigate further
players must follow yellow threads
find the hidden [ ]
lucent isn’t a color but a quality of light
a word that can mean both glowing & clear
i absent myself
of all hue but
this shining emptiness
in making me crawl
has become my whole body
i stop the player
from discovering my disease
i decide
whether it should be cured
Cassandra de Alba (she/her) is a poet living in Massachusetts. Her chapbooks habitats (Horse Less Press, 2016) and ORB (Reality Hands, 2018) are about deer and the moon, respectively, and Ugly/Sad is forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press in 2020. She is a co-host at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge, a poetry reader for IDK Magazine, and an associate editor at Pizza Pi Press. Find her on Twitter @cassandraintroy.