Lina ramona Vitkauskas
FIVE POEMS

Silver
Ambassador, Woman, Spine
Décima Muerte al Lado de Mi
Neovascular Petals as Our Love Wanes
The Purkinje Effect (Dark Adaptation)*

Poet's Bio

silver

“Silver is the future, the past, and narcissism” —Andy Warhol

Birds duel with
womb cabbage
in tulip fields

chestnuts of evolution,
A GRAINY JUNKET
all the dirty drains
become portals.

I am the protagonist,
the truant officer,
a fish that comes apart
with a minty slice
OF THE MEDITATIVE KNIFE

here we live in
the flaccid lobbies
of life

(whole life) is interrupted
by wood and paper,
fishing lures & habitats

our freight identities
    (how many times I’ve
    misspelled
    after a hummock day)
obsequious at midnight
open to the gallows
in oily August.

Décima Muerte al Lado de Mi

(para Villaurrutia)

life, my pupil dilated
and Muerte dies
in its own presence

the kitchens' conscience
of none
who/which visits me
ain't that a kick in the head?

running without walking
the anguish of thought
that we can think
of its existence

In all worlds,
the water and earth
lens

in air that I breathe
in the incidence of
of where I go and where
it goes with me

in the alienation
of my confounded blood
I don't know you, Muerte,
in my life of fire and wind

If you have hands
you have exactness
when I most believe
and your eyes watch me
without Muerte,

your luck, life's pupil
if of no disconcerting
tears, your gaze without
rosiness, your pain is with me.


For those unknowing horses
those mysterious mountains
through my closed eyes
and enters my obscured room
the evolution of change
and luminosity, eternal and pure

No sleep, you hear.
Play your silent voice
of nothing, you envelop
the body the desert odor
of sleep you know the lost,
the missing.

The depths of memory,
profound insanity you know,
classically you pass through sky,
the pact you made
in the blaze, a fugitive of the forest

¿qué será, Muerte,
de ti cuando al salir yo del mundo,
deshecho el nudo profundo,
tengas que salir de mí?

Kas yra, mirtis?  
Žiniosi kod aš eit  
turi mano išejimas ir iejimas...

neovascular petals as our love wanes

Pistils, blunt florets
here at rest and in motion
your tender components
organic and aqueous
your voice sweet pollen
in my lungs
like pending interrogatives

The geometry of your blooming eyes
is a spider under an atom bomb
running your perfect brush across me

shut off as a Cadillac mastodon
over my love months
and now dawn to you
vaporous skin I loved you

unraveling in your arms
like an 8mm film

The Purkinje Effect (Dark Adaptation)*

Persimmon violins
strike gold, implode
the census, wrestle
antlers & altitudes.
I tend to navy insomnia
darkened in Savannah rouge,
ash still crescent to my
native sex. I'd like
to exclude my tongue,
make it foreign to me
in the shift of your
color, the light of a
lover I always knew.
Pull Icarus from his
cone, sugared &
illicit. You were
evolution & steam,
all in my bed of
language & latitude.

*The tendency for the peak sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward
the blue end of the color spectrum at low illumination levels. This
effect introduces a difference in color contrast under different levels
of illumination. 

LINA RAMONA VITKAUSKAS is a Lithuanian-American poet and short fiction writer. She is Co-editor of Milk, an online literary magazine, is widely published, and is the author of numerous books, including her recent chapbook: Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star, and the forthcoming The Range of Your Amazing Nothing (Ravenna Press, 2007). Her website is www.linaramona.com.