Blue rimmed by morning
by LAURA MANUELIDIS
Snow infuses the bright spirit
of this moment
as it keeps falling
On our inebriate tilting canvas of earth
So it can gently stroke
its cleaned forehead
and stiff its straying
Hairs with crystals:
Prisms curve/d
through which we focus
the growing distant
Sleeping sun, barely raising its nose above the horizon
to carry my shovel
my shawl
my shroud of fundamental crimson
Before the footprints of the less fortunate
Ice.
wherever they may go then
by LAURA MANUELIDIS
Pity the gull dragging its broken wing to the edge
Unable to plunge either blue.
Pity the lost ship without its compass gull
Heading home : Sailors at the brink.
Pity the severed spirit that does not see the children
Delivered into perpetual orphanage
By whatever is worst that drives men to control
The reins (I mean time’s) that they never can.
Pity death itself, though naturally flawed by varicosities of pain
Is not enough to thwart the ultimate joy of our conjugal earth :
Pity that our species does not merely luxuriate
In each wingspan of unrestricted beauty
wherever its flights may go
Skulls retain a color of the mind
by LAURA MANUELIDIS
Absolute citron
Oh, this Mandarin absolut!
The French neurologist in Salpetrière
waves his wand
round the orange beard of van Gogh
although it grows from a different head
Right there, floating in formalin
Revolution fixed well: One glass jar of time.
Salut!
Think of the beer in Göettingen:
Charm of medieval scrolls preserved on walls
while angels prance stepped roofs
jingling fairy tales in silver buckled shoes.
Beneath the waiting chairs of the bright new hospital there
Lie plastic limbs of red and blue
—Emotion—
To be replaced
if people stand and wait their turn
like ghosts of tinker toys
with little joints that neatly snap
To give a kind of pleasure to non-souls
Attending, in white coats.
Everything is always perfect and orderly
Above the museum of preserved phrenology
for criminal schizophrenia :
Measurements of the coronal—
and please note—
a certain lack of imagination in the saggital.
Now in our prisons with foreign names
We don’t even bother to measure the remains
for under hooded black hats
we straightened them out
in our watery vats
Since every citizen must be correctly diagnosed :
for Questioning
[from the recesses of neuropathology
Salpietrère, hospital of Charcot, brain diseases]
Laura Manuelidis is a physician and neuroscientist who has contributed scientific articles in the fields of chromosome structure and dementias. She has published poems in diverse literary journals including: The Nation, Oxford Poetry Journal, Innisfree Journal, Evergreen Review and Pirene’s Fountain. Her first book of poetry Out of Order has an introduction by Y. Yevtushenko (that is better than the poems). Currently, she is finishing another collection One / divided by Zero, that incorporates the poems above.
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