Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 7, Number 2. November 2024. ISSN: 2581-7094
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Candice Louisa Daquin
Looking back; all the chaff of regret
Lingers a piece of you not yet hung
Where all else stretches too thin for holding
As our burden is heavier than our sum
Calculated on thin harpsichord of light
Breaking like fleet dancers o’er head,
Where else will the hedgerow thrush know
Her song or sleeping mouse burrow in dawn?
Your grey eyes like undiscovered wolves
Your lips finding my own uncovered
Pressing the smells of morning like riddles
Against empty palms
Making acrobats of ardor, still the quench
Let us linger
One more purposed motion
Testing time for
All who ink their name
Shall fade to naught
Walking from scorch
By virtue of nothing
Save the fullness of their souls
Caught in momentary
Light reflection.
The sharp toothed longing to extinguish sound
Forgo outside world; remain, breathing recycled air
Behind false walls; did no one ever tell you? There
is no safety.
Hidden pipes run beneath thin plaster, feeding
whispers
Those who lay in this room, fingered the same
stairwell
Sat listless at a table much the same, positioned to
catch light
As thirsting butterfly net draws solace in the
motion, arcing sun
Scooping life in threadbare hands, just to watch it
pour out.
This ceiling has witnessed birth and death and women
walking into walls
The bruise; a special damson, not found in nature,
such the unnaturalness
Of the act, faster than capture, a raised fist, the
anvil of time, separation
Only a word; you can hear her murmur, in-between the
brick
Soft like building a nest, even roosting pigeons
make greater din.
Her opacity, the cavern of her dust drenched eyes,
how rapid her pulse
Threading through the house’s arteries, mistress,
memory, ghost
There are no phantoms here, only movement, slights
of hand
Photographs soak up lost moisture, wisteria ravages
peeling paint
Devouring the leach of years in riotous magenta, as
if fingers drenched
In color, spilling their music, chorused against
dusky ivy, faint of heart
Home to spiders; if you watch you will see; the
uncoiling of lifetimes
Opening their arabesque against the unfurling of a
lazy haunting
Her footprints, the acidity of her breathing, still
cloying against parquet.
She is your memory; climbing the great stairwell,
pausing next to
Dust drenched photo. Even time forgets, even
semblance distorts
The actual recollection, urging on black ocean, in
Conrad’s dark bewitched heart
As still as glass, laid flat, beneath thick velvet
in sightless hour.
That Warm Light
--- Candice Louisa Daquin
She grew used to hunger
Till it became a language to delve into
The ache a reminder
She once lived
The gnaw a shadow
Of a former self
Kneeling for prayer, her arms beneath moon
In swaying movement
That moment elongated like youth
Thinking she’d live forever
Eternity her dance partner
Even then
She did not need sustaining
No warm glass of something to forget the ghosts
They were not yet powerful enough
And meal time was a delicacy of suggestion
Fruiting in her eyes
As she undid her zip
The slow fall and hiss of clothes
Finding purchase in gravity’s collapse
She stood before you bare and empty handed
Your eyes on her, hot and smiling
Causing her to
Light up like she was composed of 100 watts
Shining because you regarded her
Nothing else was necessary
Not even a meal in her empty stomach
Unaware one day, many years hence
She would need the strength of eating
Something whole and solid
To keep herself upright
Now that you
Had switched off and taken away
That warm light.
The Light Beneath the Door
--- Candice Louisa Daquin
Remember when they used to bug your phone?
The sound of rolling open polymer handpiece
Secrets folded in purring circle
Click, click, can aches be fixed?
What if you died, and left me a note
What would it say?
Who stands as muse
Now life has fled, her stockings shred
And bottles are emptied without drinking?
I think the blood of us is watching
The shard of darkness cutting swaths of fracture
across your face
Full days don’t exist
Come back here, to the light beneath the door
What does it do to beckon from shadow
If you paint from a photo, you capture no movement
Just faces in gouache
Stainless steel and facsimile reflection
A few minutes fooling ourselves
Nothing was sacred, if the lie was eaten
Did it vanquish all the time I spent, believing it
Was I the lie?
Inhabiting falsehood and words that curled like
suppliant flesh
Weren’t you there with the needle?
Obsession; the other players were faking
Plunge the sharp, feel holy numbness
I’d follow you into the hollowed mountain of your
madness and my error
For of emptied places only, you reign
Heartless and ready to start over new
As if nobody had existed and nothing was sacrificed
Memory in hose and mask plays her tricks
And obedient, you condemn.
I was an addict and I didn’t know
My drug was you. My drug was you
My drug was you. My drug was you.
The Absence of Light
--- Candice Louisa Daquin
There is a devil in my belly
She calls me on a shiny red telephone
Wrapping the cord around my throat
Exsanguinating hope
Life’s hungry dust bowl howls across my bare feet,
thirsty for saving
And you? You write me in posie
And despite the ocean separating us
Whenever sickness or sheer twist of living knocks us
down
When i fall, you stand
When you falter, I am balanced
We’d have made good slapstick act
We capture each the missing half, with fullness
It is the turn of our dial
Sometimes set on hot, sometimes cool
Arcing time and years like birds on wire
Sleep and yet, do not lose
Their position
You are my compass
It is no longer possible to imagine
Longing, without you
You are my appetite
The favored toast
As we shakily celebrate survival
While day closes her arms and slowly
From Wardour Street we pick our way
In search of open places, like ourselves
Braving against
The absence of light.
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Bio:
Candice
Louisa Daquin is of Sephardi French/Egyptian descent. She has written for the
poetry periodical Rattle and The Northern Poetry Review and is
former Senior Editor for Indie Blu(e) Publishing, a feminist
micro-press, and currently Editorial Associate with Raw Earth Ink. She
also edits for The Pine Cone Review, Parcham Literary Magazine
& Tint Journal. Daquin is co-editor of the award-winning anthologies
SMITTEN This Is What Love Looks Like: Poetry by Women for
Women and The Kali Project: Invoking the Goddess Within / Indian Women’s Voices.
Her latest personal collection is Tainted by the Same Counterfeit
(Finishing Line Press, 2022). As a woman of passionate feminist beliefs
concerning equality, Daquin’s work and support of others is her body of
evidence.
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