GLUE TRAP

by Ellena Kappos

Cicadas stuck in amber.
Thick. Light split. Full.

Bloated with it, with
all this sunlight. Like crawling your way through a glue trap. That hits the windowpane
like the little light they use to harden resin.

Not so much cone of light but Tsunami of it.
And the Floodlight floods in
Full to bursting with sorbic acid and preserving sugars.
Camera flashing. Flash bulb pop. Waterglass.
Sunlight that nothing escapes.
It’s hard resin. It’s glue. And it’s over-lit.
Stuck here and here for you alone.

This is a sunlit place.
With all its deathless cicadas. Whose voices are not marking the passage of time but a resting
place for it.
Where time falls to its knees. Arthritic. And enters deep sleep.
Hot eyelids and hot breath.

Mastic trees. Mastiha tap and all the warm,
still air which still nuzzles olive trees.
Pressing oily fingers to the glass.
Keep your mother here.

You know this room. You know the popcorn ceiling. You know the smell of heat.

Keep your mother here.
Dementia is nothing here.

Everything as it always was. How can you forget if memory is opening your eyes?
If everything is as it always was?
I made space in the cupboards for you to keep the things you love.
Your father’s charcoals are hanging in his father’s bedroom and there are fingerprints on the inside
of the archival glass.
This is easy.
This is so easy.

This does not need to hurt.

She hands you the mouse in the plastic box.
She buys pills for the sick cats.
She is pressing flour into crescent shapes.
Mastic.
And the light is flooding through the window.
Permanent.

By the Hand

You take the ghost by the hand and you lead her from the room.
You can make the trip as many times as you need to.
You have time.

Outside, April light
Is turning gnats into fireflies. Catching their little wings and lighting them up.
Turning this feeling in you into something else.
Fields and forests and maybe
Somewhere your dog
Is waiting for you.

It’s green and warm and it’s voiceless
And it feels like God.

Outside, the first sun of spring is warming long grass.

You take the ghost by the hand and lead her from the room.
You take the ghost by the hand and lead her from the room.

                 Previously published in Tough Poets Magazine

BIO

Ellena Kappos is a writer with a love of horror, film and the surreal. Her work has appeared in publications including Tough Poets Magazine, Horizon and the Monograph as well as Galleries such as The Tate as a part of the “Tate Britain x Lee Miller” Lates curation.