Each week, we choose pieces that have been submitted to Penumbra that we want to recognize and showcase to the school through Penumbra Weekly. This week's pieces are the winners of our Fall Contest!
Upon viewing Thomas Roma's picture of a woman standing in a Brooklyn Courthouse hallway.
Forgive me for noticing beauty when defeat is in the air
The lithe woman's downcast eyes remind me of an abandoned amusement park I once drove by somewhere north of Cortland
Perhaps the dirty cop who painted dope on her son just walked on a mistrial.
The richly veined marble wall she leans against reminds me of one of those improvised, yet intricate maps of southern Africa drawn by one of King Leopold's men.
This photograph overall reminds me of a shot from an Antonioni film.
A well to do woman pins herself against a marble facade, somewhere in Rome.
She would've been waiting for her lover to take her to a dinner party or gallery opening.
But the Building would not have been a courthouse.
It must have been a bank or stock exchange.
And the women would not have been black
And the only injustice she would have known: beauty fades and men get distracted.
The trees confess in whispers as they bleed,
Their crimson letters drift on ghostly swells;
The air grows sharp, a scythe to every need,
And I recall each ending: all too well.
The dusk arrives too soon, the daylight thins,
A hollow bell tolls softly in the dell;
The marrow of the year retreats within,
And grief takes root in shadows all too well.
A chill hand lingers where your warmth had been,
The harvest moon surveys what hearts won't tell;
What once was lush lies brittle, frail, and thin,
The soul remembers absence all too well.
So fall completes the circle, none dispel;
Its silence haunts the living all too well.
you leave fingerprints in indigo sighs,
pressing shadows into fragile skin-
violet bruises blooming like lilacs caught in late frost
you linger like dusk on water
soft at first touch, then sinking deep
staining my skin with soft wounds
absence smolders where I last felt your touch,
purple unraveling into embered gold
drowning in an ink spilled too deep to dim
you bruise me gentle,
then let me fade
slowly sucking out my color
you fall from my grasp–
I am a withering petal,
colors escaping into crinkles of nothingness
paralyzed in black and white
I chase your ephemeral shades of gold,
and I press deep into the purple,
where you remain beneath my skin
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