Winged Domino Unmasked, by Marion Oxley

Winged Domino: Portrait of Valentine, by Roland Penrose (UK). 1938.

Winged Domino Unmasked
 
Remove these veined delicacies from my lips,
I taste tomorrow about to take flight.
Still wings cling to her silent storm of protest.
 
She breathes in dust, rust coloured air
and remembers the heat, flesh against flesh
the dry taste of desire, saffron-tongued.
 
He places a necklace around her neck;
a rose, a twist of thorny stem.
A barbed barricade to snarl her skin.
 
The birds in her hair bother her;
the lovebird that whispers in her ear,
the blackbird that taps her skull, wings spread.
 
A grey dove rests, heavy with love.
Head turned, a glance back, a questioning eye.
She feels the weight, the pain of punctured skin.
 
Listen to the flutterings, these frenzied things
that lie like dying orange flames on lips and eyes.
Yet smooth as silk they slip, a waft of sari 
 
to kiss lids closed; poet-seer, friend.
He wakes as if from a dream; her head a solid
azure sky. He has made her a distant reality.
 
Marion Oxley 

Marion Oxley lives in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire with Alice, her three year old boisterous Staffordshire Bull Terrier. She has had poems published in a variety of poetry magazines and anthologies including, Bare Fiction, Three Drops from the Cauldron, Butcher’s Dog, Ink, Sweat and Tears and has had poems listed or placed in several well known competitions such as Fire River Poets, Write Out Loud, and The Plough Poetry Prize. She currently helps out at the local food bank.