Red Hot Sacred Goodbye

by Sigrid Bergie Feliciano

Blinds held back

A tall city sun.

Our waking

Rippled your bed sheets

Into a new arrangement

Of peaks and wavelets.

You reached over

And held me

Our bodies curved

Suited like twin cats.

Something new happened.

Liquid fire

Beat along my spine.

A red hot snake

Changing me.

To my distant city I returned

Still changing from fire.

You called

But did not come to me.

Goodbye burns deeply, softly

In the three am rain

Under the darkest moon of my window.

Wake up please.

Open your ears.

Listen to my goodbye

Shuddering in your heart.

Pain and fire

Unfurl me, cure me.

* * * * *

Sigrid Bergie Feliciano is author of Turning Out The Lights - Minnesota Book Awards nominee and Minnesota Voices Project Winner.  Among her other awards, her recent win is the international Naji Naaman Literary Prize (Complete Work) 2019 in Beirut, Lebanon.  Her poems have featured and appeared in The Talking Of Hands, The Galway Review, Burning House Press, Icarus, Writing In A Woman's Voice, ONTHEBUS, Ploughshares, The Wisconsin Review, The Great River Review...and many others around the globe.  She was a Poet in Residence/COMPAS Minnesota Writers & Artists in the Schools/Minnesota Center for the Book Arts/The Loft.  She lives with ancient oak and pine, coyote and mule deer and her husband in the foothills of Los Angeles.