'Transience', 'Apparition'

Here are two more poems from Rachel Acton Filion, joint winner of this year's Senior Poetry Prize.


Transience

My skin tingles magnetically against the wind,
The floating element potent, piercing
My stripped fingers, stripped ribs and raw throat.

The perfect ticking of measured time
Carries with it a delirious, self-induced deterioration.

Minuscule seconds click into tiny forms,
Weighted and falling away,
As aspects of my corpse slip invisibly,

Gone but still somehow latching on,
In greedy insistence.


Apparition

I fell asleep,
Blue darkness bleeding over my eyes.

From the deep shadow
You stepped out,
Light melting silently
Upon your sallow skin.
You looked a little scared.

It seemed more than a grasping
Fabrication of my mind,
Because your voice was
So lucid, so distinctively yours,
Bare and shaken.

A locket dangles in desolate pain,
And will remain forever.
The stony sharp chain
Pleasingly slices the fingers
Which wrap tightly around
Never surrendering to release.

It's so heavy,
Encapsulating
What you
Told me.