Audrey Keiffer

Floral Roundabout


When my grandmother visits I smell a wisp
of floral fragrance. Some days it’s fresh
as she showers in an alternate universe
and chooses rose over lily perfume
in a glass bottle with two hearts.

Her visits are brief. I may be laying fetal
with a sweat soaked pillow or burying a dead
iguana. His name was Kermit.
Maybe I whiskey punched a brick wall
and the lily feeling comes over me. Floral
rolls my eyes to the back of my head.

I am inside a capsule
of flowers. I headline my female roots,
writing her score,
channeling her Depression days:
the dust bowl, the cigarettes,
the lung cancer and the hoarded cans
​next to the oven. Corn, peas, carrots.
​

Migraine Midnight Bury Me


Flashing red stoplights and car sounds orchestrate saxophonic spasms. A saxophone digs out my
eye. A chisel sculpts half of my skull into blood pulse. Screws shred bone to keep my coffin in line.
Chisel sculpts half of my skull into blood pulse.

Serotonergic synapse hammer me in to the underground, case me in dreams with dragons.

Open hemicrania is enough for black beetles to crawl, lapsing into the drips of pale-yellow
illuminating the gray night wall. Black beetles bleed into night gray ceiling. Positron Emisson
Tomography says, “raiNBOW demystifies your irideSCENT brain!” The smell of dirt is burning.
Lily of the valley is burning. Hand palms wet blanket my face.

Serotonergic synapse hammer me in to the underground, case me in dreams with dragons.

I lay in a bed of floral arrangements.
In certain ways they don’t go together: rose, lily,
snapdragons, zinnia. My mother
offers me a bouquet and I accept, run
upstairs and slip it into a blue china vase.
Floral is gone if I inhale again. I smell
skin and litter box. Sometimes I’ll fall fast
asleep, but sometimes if I stay awake
the scent will come again.


 

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Audrey Keiffer is a poet and artist living in Kansas City, Missouri with her two siamese cats. Audrey’s poetry and art explore themes of emotion, the unconscious, neurological and psychological conditions. She will soon receive her BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Missouri – Kansas City, and will attempt existence in the “real world.” For more about Audrey, visit her website and her tumblr site.