“WILDFLOWER HELL”
Feel free to stroll the grounds. Take in the lush botanicals and verdant greenery. Breath in the exotic aromatics, feast your eyes upon the plumage of rare birds, behold golden boughs heavy with sensuous fruit, submerge the senses in the wonder……..Hey! Don’t touch……..oh, great….we lost another one.
(Remember, roses have thorns and smiles can kill.)
“WILDFLOWER HELL: Amalgamated Poems” is Tanya Rakh’s most recent collection of poetry. This collection is cleverly broken in four sections or chapters that correlate to the seasons and are assigned an appropriate flower. An allusion to the Victorian language of flowers? Perhaps. Visual symbolism with an intended meaning? Absolutely!
Regardless of the intriguing layout of the collection, the true magic(k) of this book lies within the individual pieces. Each is a piece of imagery laden fruit reminiscent of the French Symbolists in aesthetic and an active experiment in form. Yet, these are not simply aesthetically appealing filler or mere decorative language arranged in a pleasing fashion. Oh, no. There is a darker, dystopian, undercurrent pulsing through these petals (knowledge comes with the curse of being tainted so the myth implies). Alluring, razor-sharp petals etched with Tanya’s surrealist filagree cutting doors to the unique dimensions of her mind’s eye. Through these freshly carved doors we can partake of a sensory engaging buffet where some things are sweet, some succulent, some bitter and some bite back. And that, my friends, is what makes these pieces truly poetry.
So, with that, I encourage you explore Tanya’s garden of botanical oddities, I can assure that you will not regret it.
(from Wildflower Hell)
that summer
She grows much older that summer. All amber and chlorophyll, she peels from her roots, lets her branches furl across forest in veins and rivers. Finds tesseract and pearl tooth hiding among willows, amphibious stars crackle for the choke point.
In summer she evaporates, multiplies in prism, a gallery of refractions. She gazes into train lights and refuses. I’m tired, she tells them, spills out a dusty road instead, swaps her feet for years of windstorms. They say she lives here still, always howling. Until the day no one remembers, she echoes nightingale beneath your trees.
Dim memory lights and fissures in our boneyards. All oceans filled with swollen death, the mermaids left for orchid water long ago.
Before the sun there was a poem here, verses sunk in soapstone, etched in gold. Each syllable a cut in time. Now the timeworn lines have found a doorway, loosened their ankle ties, but incantations fade and calcify with parallels, an undead choral prophecy.
It always ends this way—the heavy dragon eats its tail in mired calculations. Always the sun rolling down the same mountain, that same weightless mountain where time and love move together but refuse to make eye contact, sleep rigid on opposite sides of the bed, the sheets soaked in pleading. The same nightmare cycles again.
Each razor story, every gray, splintered home. Each tall rooftop bent by this deafening momentum, this entropy dance of meat clinging to skeleton, these endless days of wheat and water.
All of this, alive in tapestry. Hungry for bones and hearts and holes through inertia. She grows much older that summer. Eats from fruit trees and falls asleep a stream. An ocean someday, a sun cascading down mountains. The moon rises here in whispers still; bright stars spin awake behind the haze.
