after image

when you close your eyes and fall asleep
your mouth changes
your lower lip sets back
like the life holding it in place has let go
can’t help but imagine this is the face whose cheek
I’ll tenderly kiss
when your body ceases

behind this thought comes another
I desperately hold

your beautiful face not defined by age
rather your brilliant smile and eyes
infused with the will of a thousand newborns

AM Roselli

Leftover Sensations, new flash piece published in Free Lit Magazine!

Posted on September 22, 2017 by AM Roselli

LEFTOVER SENSATIONS

When Luthien woke his skin was the color of flat sand on a starless evening. What the hell happened last night? He sees a sky not quite black. The moon, a shredded toenail hanging on a milky weave. Leftover sensations of tepid glass–thick tumbler, lazy ice.

Last evening he stopped on his way home. Between shots of Jack Daniels, Luthien remembers a powerful mouth. In the small bar–a big woman whose billowing lips could suck the enamel off teeth. What did he do? Did that insane mouth hoover the color from his body? Luthien’s fair skin that goes lobster belly pink on the beach is now dull grey. Was he vacuumed dry? Luthien hopes he’ll wake and find his skin its proper shade. But Luthien you are grey. Too bad.

Nervously he squeezes his eyelids shut. Shelby and her tears. She’d found him and Cassandra porn-style in ‘their’ bed. So what if he and Shelby picked out the duvet with coordinating sheets. The woman in the bar had lips like clamps–tight and hot. Big, deep red wet lips. Did he hear a name from that strange sucking mouth? Martianna, Maliana, Marvianna? A sentence slithers into his ear. A velvet tongue like he’s never tasted in thirty-eight years. Translucent hands pulling his hair so hard his head whacks the bar wall and he doesn’t give a shit. Her surreal mouth, a serpentine force plundering his desperate throat. Did that burgundy wet nurse utter something to his bourboned-out body?

Think Luthien. You almost talked Shelby out of leaving post-Cassandra fuck. The name. It will be important. Take a moment. Go through the minutes after her lips sucked your dick through your throat. Those red lips whispered something.

“When a heart is shattered, its pieces fall to earth. Tears of pain water and grows the blood rose that springs forth the serpent that feeds on the rat.”

The bedroom clock screams. Luthien wakes to the sun’s rays slithering past his silk curtains. His mane of hair, dripping sweat, soaking the grey cotton sheets. Saturday morning. Shelby would have slapped the alarm off then woken him with a tender kiss.   They used to make love on Saturdays.

Love writing flash fiction, especially monster-themed. I let loose a bit more when invoking character voices. Hope you enjoy, leftover sensations, as much as I enjoyed writing it 😘
As the writing gods sometimes align themselves, my dear, faraway writing friend, DS Levy also in this issue with a masterful short, Pit Viper.
adore this cover art by Aisha Ali!

traveling to Venus

Posted on September 20, 2017 by AM Roselli

new painting – thank you for visiting

butterfly lenses

Posted on August 23, 2017 by AM Roselli

butterfly lenses, in the The Paragon Journal – a thoughtful, artful, and lovely publication

BUTTERFLY LENSES

Boil it down to edge of the pot and residue remains where they died. I once believed all crabs were all born red until I saw my first Jersey blues. Cobalt and beautiful. What a thrill, lowering twine anchored to raw chicken necks. I didn’t know when these chickens lost their necks. Didn’t see them die. There are birds born to be dead then peppered for mouths with breadcrumbs and butter.

Of those blue beauties, I thought we discovered something profoundly
remarkable like the first dead cicada I’d assumed was a prehistoric fly.

Childhood eyes of marbles and butterfly lenses. The pot heavy with water, sparkling like the ocean, clatters onto the stove looking less bright in the sandy evening. That day the beach was too hot. We’d almost drowned in the powerful riptide, but didn’t. Saved by a rope that resembled the very same cord we pulled the blue beauties up from their ocean floor homes–hemp their chains and our salvation.

Into the pot

I hear screams of angry bleeding in the cottage kitchen with its lighthouse curtains fluttering in the salty breeze. My stomach lurches. Blue, red, all colors boiling together.

Sickness and seasoning

As your blue shells grow fire red, purple specks melting off indigo thumbprints vanish as if you never had life. Bright engine red wailing silenced for a sharpened knife.

This is the day I learn all crabs are not born red.

This was the day I learned when to break my butterfly lenses.

this poem is based on a true childhood experience.
the first time I ever saw live crabs boiled I was with a friend’s family down the shore.
I was shocked when the crabs we were fishin’ out of the ocean were not bright red
this was the first and only time in my life I ever became homesick
“my mom and dad would never boil live creatures,” is what was running through my eleven-year-old mind
(cover and image belongs to Paragon Journal – I added cover blurb for WP image)
thank you

and the crows fall, new piece published in Panoply!

Posted on August 18, 2017 by AM Roselli

had a new piece, and the crows fall, published in Panoply, A Literary Zine – a most excellent journal

Languishing poles. Highway of wobbly crucifixes, running the length of asphalt where the unmerciful sun crashes earth. Sharp black silhouettes dive-bomb steeple ears of corn at the place the Lord floats to heaven. Crows die on the land, sometimes falling from the sky. Water slapping the wrong side of the ocean. A vertical worry crease in her forehead–
a flesh canyon to hold wetness for droughts sure to come. Dried deadness. Fields twisted from parched riverbed to riverbed. He guzzles precipitation from a flat silver flask, tarnished on the rim, where it once was forgotten in a steamy summer rain.

Farm got in the way of her writing. Words got in the way of his drinking. Clogging the soil and his arteries.

Crows fall from the sky, like May flies in August.

artwork created way, way, way back in college, ink print from a zinc plate etching

golden opportunity

Posted on December 31, 2016 by AM Roselli

back to the beginning
evolution
back to the beginning
2016

the world spins
axis
the world spins
speculation

yet this morning, I couldn’t keep off the keys
music
yet this morning, I couldn’t keep off the keys
social media

steer by the stars
navigate
steer by the stars
fame

“It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times…”
we tend to forget
we tend to remember

need a period of darkness to bloom
poinsettias
need a period of darkness to bloom
civility

golden opportunity
ours
golden opportunity
2017

kryptonite

Posted on July 27, 2016 by AM Roselli

sometimes she just gets tired
her little world snags on the edge
it doesn’t want to spin
neither does she
kryptonite sometimes settles across her womb
in the dark where light once lived
a spec of universal magic
slapping weightless color across heaving walls
offers no more portals
and the face present for all
is its most false
on the other side
baby chimp in prisma on construction paper done a few years back-thank you

tomorrow…

Posted on March 22, 2016 by AM Roselli

I ache for something
what could it possibly be
I have so much
but I ache
still
there in my soul
a pinch
reaches out for my heart
straight up to the brain
then
out it spills
landing
here
the ache
it’s still there
in here
these words didn’t do it either
guess I’ll have to try again
tomorrow…

your efforts

Posted on March 20, 2016 by AM Roselli

Tidy Bowl Man

Posted on June 22, 2015 by AM Roselli

I have a sinking sense sometimes
the cork in my dinghy will pop out
while getting sucked down into a watery vortex –
a horrifying image…

Do you know what happened to the
Tidy Bowl Man?
I’ll tell you if you don’t know or can’t remember –
his career ended up in the crapper.

I don’t want to end up
in the crapper
wearing a white sea-captain suit.
I don’t want to spiral helplessly down, down, downward,
while desperately crying out,
“…it works so you don’t have toooooooooo–”

I vow to always work. I promise to never be lazy.
And I’ll always keep a plunger nearby, in case I hear the Tidy Bowl Man’s plea 😉

LoBoat Illustration created a few months ago and previously published.

Fellow blogger and friend, Deb of C-Dog & Company and I often discuss the merits of keeping our respective creative dinghies afloat 🙂 One must keep their sense of humor when discussing dinghies, corks and creativity 😉