POETRY BY LANI BURSHTEIN

Lani Burshtein is a schoolteacher, artist and writer living in Toronto. Her poetic interests include disaster, history, visual arts, opulence, childhood and constructed identities.

JACK-O-LANTERN

Cold-slimed in the chamber
Of tangerine sinews
A flickering taper

Blinking continues
Through rough crenellations
Morse message, diffused

In mossy striations
That ripple with meat
Autumnal palpation

Aglow on concrete
For courage, a candle
Rot-softened, but sweet

A frost-glittered mantle
Upon the lawn’s dark
Gloom and glee, spangled

Wet-toothed and stretch-marked,
Geometry’s prank: a
smirk cut to spark

THE BONELESS ONE

At last, the octopus of deep malaise…
I speak to you aloud but once; so heed.
In me, no pity spreads a tender flower,
In flex, my tentacles constrict your seed.

Your invocations to my god collapse.
I have no maker: birthlessly, I swim,
Jelly-damp through brain’s dendritic stew.
My deeds do not reflect some sacred whim.

Alone, I chose to strangle what was yours,
My suckers suction, terrible and awesome.
There is no treatment for octopic dread,
My hunger never flags; you sag, I blossom.
Deny my might; refuse to feed my pangs.
It makes no difference to a boneless wraith.
You bend; I spiral through your nervous tree,
Pluck off your leaves; and feast on severed faith.

You cannot—what was that?—no mind, pure dust.
You cannot gash my wickedness with glee.
I grab and hold—what horror! An approach,
A darker shadow looms; with haste, I flee!

RECESS PIECES

Children at play in the old boneyard’s gristle,
stomping on tibia, crackle and crunch
Sipping their soup from a cranium bowl
when spreading their picnic for sinister lunch
Sweetmeats unwrapped on the ossified knoll
where wishbones make slingshots and arrows once lived
A rag torn from shroud to blow nose and wipe sniffles
and playforts constructed from bodies gone stiff
Scramble through bramble of ribcages shattered,
Hide-and-go-seeking the junk of the passed
Parents will cower where skeletons clatter
and creak under sneakers. A humerus cache.
There, games are contested where flesh turns to ash.