Tracing the Outlines of Nepenthe

COLORLESS SHEETS — Languid in this light is the ambiguity of purity: dark predictions rising through viscose green jello. Imagine unraveling like string into a memory. Smudged winks; An allergy to the world; Pomegranate stains seeping through the apropos of nothing. And at the end, a door. Prolixity is a self-fueling virus and this, alas, is not the worst of it: remove humanity from one side of the equation and time teeters into the wrong realm, detaching muscle from bone.

Sky and Earth Atone a Mirage of Still Agonies

THE COLLARBONE OF THE SKY — The immeasurable malignancy of routine knits death into the moonlight. It’s a very painful slaughter of innocents: bees drown in honey; Eve’s knees ground into the dirt of paradise. A stark hiss – there is a luxury in running as if there is a place to rest. A neon sign reads: “life and no escape.” How many times have you been reincarnated? Puncture your freckles and prepare to deflate.

The Collage of Memory

AN EMPTYING MIND — Absence seeps into blood, severing into the self: longing is living. Insatiability is our only common factor. Opalescent, thick tears build cathedrals out of tiny experiences. Human existence? Decaying stars; fragments looking back up at the sky. Mosaic, disenchantment is truth. Pastiche, the moon erases the stars around her after sundown. And now the stars become abysmal planets again, absorbed in neutrality and apathy: ruin.

Clocks with No Hands

It is not nothingness: Stiffened and blackened dead flies in a web are a type of existence. This is the silence of fragility. Watching the sweet viscous liquid, the royal heaviness, drop slowly from a spoon as a voice like the voids whispers about nostalgia tainted by self-deception. Marble that bleeds sinks to human shape in its longing.

A Crypt of Desire

DECREPITUDE TO THE CORE — Perfume bottles momentarily un-stoppered in a quite simple, desperate cadaverousness. To devour without guilt is an art that implores eternity. A ray of sunlight pierces and suddenly, it’s evening. Sigh. Sigh again. There is no return from a malady as such. Travel to the edge of the world, to that place where what isn’t may be.

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Natasha Teymourian is a Brazilian poet and artist based in San Diego, where she got her BA in Literature & Writing Studies from CSU San Marcos. She is the Editor in Chief of Epigraph Press and author of Recurrent Events, published in 2018. Her work has appeared in Sad Girl Review, Honey & Lime Lit, post ghost press, and Guttural Magazine. Natasha can be found in local coffee shops, museums, and on social media (@natashateym).