‘Eaters’, ‘St. Stephen's Green as a Lavender Field’ & ‘Venison’

Jules Brassard: This artistic approach is a world of spontaneity and reality. Mainly focused on street and event photography, humans remain the main subject. He likes to transmit emotions through his photographs, transmitting moments of sharing, of laughter, of joy, of pain... all these emotions that make us all human. These spontaneous moments where we reveal ourselves to others without a mask, without a filter.

Eaters

Your ghost sucks my torment like peaches
hand-picked from the summer tree
tethered to the shitty soil in the backyard.
Peach fuzz gliding against chains
rusted, bleeding, (rotting)
from deep sun and moths.

Plucking the meat off the stone
till it rolls along a vacant tongue
dry and ridgid, flesh fibers
confined between teeth. I floss
until my gums gush copper
and heavy
yet juice drips from my chin
it’s red and dying and of plums

St. Stephen's Green as a Lavender Field

The river reflects the silhouette of two bodies,
two souls merging on a stone bridge.
Evergreen oaks still bare, begging
to sprout and bloom and sing the prologue
of new desire, simmering to a craving
for how each others’ names linger
on swollen tongues like wine.

They thought stone awaited the imprint of incisors,
the splatter of blood faded to raspberry stains.
That their love would be bound to a diary
with the pronouns changed (just in case). Confined
to the spine of some journal in an underwear drawer,
imprisoned behind ribs.

That the scent of grass
(taking deep breaths)
didn’t belong to girls like them.

Here, the cobblestone just hums.
Stripped of rainbow flags and shirts reading
“i turn mascs into bottoms”
here, there is no audience
only sediment lining water. Here,
they sip the glitter of midnight without choking.

Wide gazes narrow with each glimmer
of robin calls, charmed
by one another’s reflection
in the glistening river—
a mirror of softened lips becoming one.

Venison

Crushed by hands slick with sanguine—
not his. A doe
who looked through his father, too,
sits submissive in the truck’s trunk, blackberries
blurred into the sand of her chest.
She still has that charming
sparkle in the echo of her pupils
where boy eyes gaze the reflection
of a voice choked. Years ago. Trailed off
the way murmurs do.

A fluttered heart hushed
to a whisper, there’s a boy buried
under flesh colored bricks
too heavy to bear, heavier
with age.
Reduced to an easy stone mug
and words
iced and antlered.

Like a willow or a mine he demands
to be felt.
White-tailed exhales caught
in a stranger’s throat
the way potted water boils,
rolling and regular. Pillow-feathered breaths
bittered by the whisk of early morning,
strict rises. Of unfounded blood.

Hear the boy sing ripped apart
caged behind ribs.
He laments the scent of pine
though he, too, becomes ash.

Sarah Mengel (she/her) is a sapphic poet and English grad student from PA. Her work has been published with The Ekphrastic Review and others.