‘Truth Rising’, ‘Blood Moon Eclipse’ & ‘Radiation’
Ella Wang picked up a camera two years ago and has fallen in love with photography since, no matter the genre: street, portrait, architecture, underwater, concert, and more. Still being a highschooler, she has learned to balance her academics with photography. During class, you might catch her debating how much grain to add to an image for that perfect amount of "vintage".
Truth Rising
Wind chimes. Hummingbirds. The way
Yucatan houses are arranged around a courtyard,
breezes drifting room to room in the heat,
then daily rain at 4:30.
Music. My daughter’s voice. A hawk
or a falcon diving for prey no bigger than my fist.
No bigger than my heart.
My daughter knows a story doesn’t have to be true,
it only has to sound real.
My new dishes are called El Centro,
like the neighborhood I once stayed in.
Bought at a flea market, packed
in dusty milk crates, the colors sang
to me from across a parking lot.
As a child my mother broke quarantine,
brought polio home like a covered dish.
Her throat partially paralyzed,
she submerged her truth in the cenote
where she taught me to swim
and to drown my words.
Later they would surface like a body.
No. Like a lotus.
Blood Moon Eclipse
Scorpio brings May’s flower
moon to my door, touching
the outer edge of Earth
with a lover’s caress.
The sighting is faint
and easy to miss.
Stare into it. The rays
will not harm your eyes.
Not a show stopper
like the sun at Medugorje.
It shimmers, a slow dance among stars.
Guided only by candle light
I plot a crystal grid --
black tourmaline, selenite, moonstone,
clear quartz. A ritual performed
under invisible moon.
I pray, breathing in a smoke of sage,
palo santo, lavender, and mugwort.
A purple flame burns my regrets.
There is a shadow between us.
The work of a demon god,
holding sun and moon in his mouth?
A sibyl portending doom?
Diana asleep, sated from the hunt?
Do our sorrows block out the light?
Time stops. The shadow
passes. All the moon’s phases in minutes.
Truth takes wing, flying into the reddening disc,
a glowing ember among stars.
Radiation
Not the radiance of youth or beauty.
Not a glow on a dial, a heater coil,
nor the devastation of Hiroshima, Chernobyl,
Three-Mile Island. A healing by killing,
the battlefield my chest.
I’m fitted into a plaster mold,
my arm painfully raised,
North Star inked on my chest,
a purple, magic marker road map
which I must not wash off for 6 weeks.
Was it a plan or a prayer?
I lie on a sterile table. A steel, hinged
arm rotates a nose cone into place
over my mangled breast. The woodland
wallpaper meant to soothe refuses.
I close my eyes,
imagine angels surrounding me,
their wings shielding me from harm,
their hands on my body. Healing.
Doctors and technicians leave the room.
I am alone.
Cancerous.
Radiant.
Claire Warner is a Connecticut poet and writer. She is a past editor of Connecticut River Review, a poetry journal, and FltBrief, an aviation newsletter with a national readership. her poems have been included in venues such as Blue Unicorn, Connecticut River Review, and Orphic Lute.
