Cecile Randall
Bio
Rose-tinted diarist
Stories (6)
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One Sunny Morning
What does it say about me—the fact that I like to dance when I am alone? I listen to music that sounds like love. It belongs to the slowest, sugared mornings, when lace clings to my skin and coffee sweetens my mouth. I pause to watch my silhouette pirouette across the mirror. For a brief hour every morning, I am the pinnacle of womanhood. I twirl. I pinch at my stomach. I lie my head on satin pillows and stare at the ceiling and think and wonder and regret. I let jazz warm my soul. My room is messy and so is my heart. My vulnerabilities need no witness to breathe. I perform femininity for my own eyes, and thus I will always remain romantic, expressive, effervescent.
By Cecile Randall2 months ago in Poets
Sediment
I can feel the rot in my body starting. I’ve been sedentary too long today, and I know it will only spread to my lungs. The branches I see from my window strike a stick-thin silhouette against the white sky. I belong with them—spindly and rooted. It would take far too much effort now to uproot myself and shake off this creeping mold and make something of myself today. I am ballast. I am corroded. I am a heavy stasis. A tree rarely falls unless some force unearths it, and no such force is coming for me. I settle deeper into the decaying sediment of myself.
By Cecile Randall2 months ago in Poets
Orichalcum
I bike past an old man every day as I return from work. He is always in the same park. He plays a trumpet, sitting proper and alone in his sunlit spotlight, for a crowd of none (save for the pigeons, and me). I always pedal slower to hear. I want to run my knuckles over its brass spine and see if my fingers remember what my mind does not. I want to remember the feel of cold metal against my lips, the tightening of my chest as I hollow my lungs of air. I want to remember the sweet sound it made under my touch. His orichalc notes ring nostalgically throughout this dappled meadow, and I think, how strange, to hear an art I once created myself. How beautiful. How terrible.
By Cecile Randall2 months ago in Poets
Midwinter
Winter sinks its teeth into my skin, burrows into my bones and makes a home for itself. There are few moments where I feel more alone than when I am walking, frigid and shivering, my breath coalescing in the air before me, reminiscent of smoke from an old man’s pipe; but I am not yet old, and I do not smoke, and despite my life still winding before me I feel aged and heartless and alone. Today I empathize with snowflakes caught in a hibernal spider’s web, which should have had longer to tilt their crystalline arms to the sky and twirl and laugh.
By Cecile Randall2 months ago in Poets
Apricity
I should think myself fortunate that my penmanship is not defined by some theme such as melancholy, or rage, or hopelessness. If there is one thing I am certain of, it is that I use sweet words far too often to be a woman of pain or great sorrow, and I do hope my poems convey that. If writing is a window into a poet’s mind and soul, I hope my window is candlelit: warmth spilling across the floor, colouring the walls liquid amber, clearing the shadows from even the most cobwebbed corners of my thoughts; joyful and soft and seraphic and authentic and always open to the midmorning sun, no matter what it brings to light. You should know, the blinds to my mind are never drawn, and the apricity of my thoughts will always be shared. Please, stay a while. Do me the kind favour of lingering.
By Cecile Randall2 months ago in Poets
Carnivore
Love makes you search for crumbs of it everywhere; lick the plate clean, suck the pulp dry. After all, what is more animal than love? We are all carnivores of affection. The heart is an organ, yes, but also a plate laid bare on a table set for desire. Such a table asks no napkin; we are animal, we are human. I miss when someone couldn’t get enough of me. Perhaps no one truly can—who could ever be sated, when the taste of love marks no fullness? Satiation is an empty promise. I hope it is not unbecoming of me to crave that sweet hunger once again. True, that love always did taste better unfinished.
By Cecile Randall2 months ago in Poets
