My Featured Blogger this week is Gabrela Marie Milton of Short Prose. Gabriela is an Amazon bestselling poet. She’s also a Pushcart Prize nominee and 2019 Author of the Year at Spillwords Press, as well as the author of the #1 best-selling poetry collection Woman: Splendor and Sorrow. Her poetry and short prose have appeared in various international magazines and anthologies. Her newest collection Wounds I Healed: The Poetry of Strong Women has just been published and is an Amazon #1 New Release!

Knowing

Around me “all-knowing” people. Happy because they think they know. Yet what brings them happiness is what they do not know. Ignorance repeats itself with the precision with which Big Ben tells the time.

These days the child has an imaginary friend called Li Boo. One night an avocado seed crawled on the north wall of the mansion, reached the roof, and bloomed to the sound of a fanfare that happened to go by. Li Boo came out of the bloom, wrapped in sea silk, blueberry eyes, strawberry lips gasping for moonlight.

Back in our bedroom I throw at you stars dressed in chiffon skirts.  Roads toward tomorrow break the walls.  The air smells mastic, cyclamen, and rockroses: the smell of the Corsican maquis; the essence of Corsica.  Sirens.  Homer’s Odyssey. Occupations. Feuds. Purification of Sunday’s water.

Another fanfare goes by. A lizard shakes her head pointing toward the West. Your raspy voice turns toward the South. It flickers in pine trees. It slithers in the white sand. It goes beyond the taste of the daily bread.

Li Boo, sweet tears on his cheek, salt and rose petals in his boots, disappears into my consciousness.

I know nothing. Another claim to fame. Did you smile, my love?

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To read more of Gabriela’s work, click here!