Jade Riordan – Three Poems

This Still Life Cubed

I don’t want anything
else.

My back melts into canvas melts
into wall sharpens. A Blue Period

rains in through the window and
paint runs into my hair. Rain pours
in and I run out to the front yard.

The kitchen follows then continues
out onto the street; bread knives slice
the city into hills and valleys and hills and

the people sharpen into Picassos.

The Great Lake leaks Blue Nude
into a valley

and I, canvas back pressed
against the wall, melt back
into a Child
with a Dove.

*Child with a Dove (1901) and Blue Nude (1902) are paintings by Pablo Picasso.

The Inside of a Blister

The inside of a blister: eggplant sky
and ivy holding the buildings
together. We’d be the new skin
of a hug in motion, the second
of standstill in a waltz: measure

1 2 3

Aubergine undertones and climbing
toward the clouds. No weakness
in a handshake, a hug, holding tight.
Nor in the release: breathe out.
We rise like vapour, evaporate
as morning mist, as angels
returning to the atmosphere.

Fifth Season

I want to be both the ode
and the dismemberment:
the fifth season
that we forgot to name,
the air in the billows of curtains,
but not the breath
that surrounds them.

I will be a multitude:
every tree
circling the clearing,
every forest 
singing bark onto the moon,
every solitude 
weaving grain into a sunrise.

I am searching for the root,
the cavity:
something that replicates
the exact shape a name makes
upon the tongue.
The angle at which lives intersect.

Jade Riordan is from northern Canada; she’s currently attending university further south. Her poetry has appeared in The Fib Review, Half Mystic Journal, Maudlin House, NōD, and elsewhere. She is a member of Bywords’ selection committee.