Extraordinary Beast

Extraordinary Beast

Carolina Gonzalez

Penumbra Press Series 2

This book is funded by the Instructionally Related Activities Grant of California State University, Stanislaus.

California State University, Stanislaus

Penumbra Literary and Art Journal

1 University Cr.

Turlock, CA 95382

Cover design by Jewel Rodriguez

Edited by Autumn Andersen, Essence Saunders, Andrea Wagner, and Jarred White.

Copyright © 2023 by Carolina Gonzalez

Penumbra Press, 2023.

All Rights Reserved.

Penumbra Press is an extension of Penumbra and Penumbra Online. For more information, see our website at www.penumbraonline.org

The Penumbra Press Selection Process

For the second year in a row, our team has been fortunate enough to receive a plethora of compelling, captivating, and carefully crafted works. Rather than coming to a quick and unanimous decision, we had many exciting contenders for publication. The viability and print-ability of these submissions cannot be understated. Yet, we could only publish two this year, a decision that spurred on many spirited discussions about theme, tone, mood, structure, and imagery. This exciting process is one of the things we enjoy most about Penumbra and we are thankful to have had such amazing content made available to us. The poets we have selected are true stars of their craft and their poems have earned the respect and admiration of the Penumbra staff. We are delighted to present their works in the second edition of Penumbra Press.

Right away, the Penumbra Press staff was captivated by Carolina’s visceral chapbook, Extraordinary Beast. The chapbook captures love in all of its forms with each poem feeling like a different intimate conversation between lovers. Extraordinary Beast is a poetic experience that captures the essence of love’s ethereal quality. It is a chapbook that is sure to captivate readers from beginning to end.

In addition to being thorough in our selection, we wanted to be sure to curate a beautiful cover that would convey powerful images and emotions. After considerable time and careful consideration, we selected Jewel Rodriguez, an art student at Stanislaus State, to create Carolina’s cover. We felt that the message of the author was highlighted by the artist’s creation. With the inclusion of the incredible cover artwork, Extraordinary Beast is an example of the beauty in artistic collaboration. We hope you enjoy Carolina Gonzalez’s Extraordinary Beast.

Table of Contents

001 Tajinaste* Honey - 9

002 Insane - 11

003 The Flutes Are Playing - 12

004 Dreams That Save - 13

005 Bruises - 14

006 It Hurts - 15

007 Heatwave - 16

008 Lemon Pie - 18

009 Emerald Sea- 20

0010 Because I Ask You - 21

0011 Gift - 22

0012 Drops of Light - 24

0013 Tigress - 25

0014 The Nest - 26

0015 Black Train - 28

0016 Destiny - 29

0017 One Year Ago - 30

0018 Dark Feast - 31

0019 The One I Will Not Share - 32

0020 That Night - 33

0021 Pomegranate Heart - 34

0022 Delight - 35

0023 The Twilight Room - 37

0024 Frater - 38

This book—and really, everything I write—is a conversation with a lover, in which the lover changes form in every new piece; the bodies change, but the feeling stays the same.

Since I am a spiritual worker with over three decades of practice, the experience of the Divine is very tangible and present in my everyday life; that means that these poems are way less metaphorical than they seem, and that when I talk about Gods and Spirits, and about Nature as their embodiment, I do it as someone who has met them, and not as someone who imagines them.

Just as they are not metaphorical, they are not hypothetical; each one of these poems has been fully, deeply lived, from the first line to the last.

Love is the extraordinary beast that lives behind every poem in this book—the way it changes us, ravages us, blesses us, and shows us our profoundly sacred nature.

Sometimes, when you are not paying attention he looks at you like you are a spoonful of Tajinaste honey and he is tasting it his eyes smile all the time

after you have been away all day he undoes your braids and breathes your hair his fingers gripping you as he inhales deeply

at night, he slips a leg between yours and snugs his knee just a little bit higher his skin burning and then he falls asleep.

He makes you so violently happy that you feel the muscles in your stomach contract when you think of his breath spilling into your mouth as he says your name he is the Light as he enters your body and you give him the Night.

* Note: the Tajinaste is a type of flower endemic to the Canary Islands and the Macaronesia. The bees who pollinate it produce a unique type of honey, with a very strong perfume.

If we are insane then we are insane like two Gods are insanely making love under the sacred deadly seeping flowers insanely living what they all said could not be done insanely giving birth to a Universe so filled with luxuriance that only the Gods, the insane ones, can inhabit it.

If we are insane

then we are insane like mountains, insane like thunder insane like the thought of travelling beyond time every night to wake up next to each other.

003 The Flutes Are Playing

The flutes are playing, my love, and I’m beginning to know you beginning to understand that we came here to dance around the table where a feast is laid among the oleander trees that spill their perfume (black oil of holy death, lover to lover) onto the spine of the nightfall.

The flutes are playing, my love, so loud and intoxicating and I’m following you through the fields through the prophecies written in the vines through the hidden paths that others before us abandoned and only you could find again and as the flutes play, we escape, we whisper, we hallucinate; we make the flowers gleam in the dark with our hearts our hearts, stars of the harvest Gods, stronger than time itself.

004 Dreams That Save

Dreams that save you and memories that blaze days when I knew what you were thinking among four burning, tropical walls days when you were looking at your own body as if it was the first time

Dreams that save me, you take me home, a home drenched in wine and honey and secrets and the strength in your hand a home where we sleep on the floor, all doors and windows open so every beast can roam inside and your Gods and mine can watch us dream the dreams that save us.

I say one of us is going to end up with bruises you say when and the dark bird in your smile flies across the room and we both know it’s both of us

because we’re just the same, we never have enough it’s never perfect it’s never too much we’re never scared to jump it’s never too close, never too sweet or too spicy and we both know that the morning after we won’t mind the bruise.

I know it hurts to love when only the other can lick your wounds for so long one was frozen and the other was blind but at the same time

did you ever breathe like this? Did the world ever seem so exuberant, so saturated with taste? Did you ever live as if living was a choice you made every morning with wild fervour?

You stand before me in the dying light naked and unshielded

I know it hurts to be there to be the raptor and the seized prey, the master and the hostage, the mouth and the food

we’re just terrible at this but the joy oh, the joy.

In the palm of your hand lie all the wrong choices you made the love you did not keep and that you gave first to everyone, then to no-one;

and so much softness.

In the scar on your back lies the second you lost sight of the future the point where the game changed direction the mirror that reveals the shadow that you hide

fragility, expectations, and a certain kind of loss.

Inside the skin

the soul mostly not fitting correctly you were too much for too many, and also never enough for anybody, never appropriate, hunger, and thirst, and only a few times, peace.

At the end of your stillness there is always so much left to tell so much that I will keep so you don’t have to

and so much softness. This heatwave is drowning away the memories like a slow river; in the blackness of sleep let them go.

Under the trellis the purple grapes drowse while the bumblebees dance adoringly around them as in a secret ritual; drops of golden light fall on the table where the Strongest Lady In The World is cutting the lemon pie.

So much noise, and so many people, and we are the only ones who are quiet; you are looking at your book and I am following the line of your profile wishing I could draw you like that, and I know I will as soon as this dream ends.

Under the trellis summer is deeply, tenderly alive, bursting with wine and dates and songs and the way your lips bow when you concentrate.

Under the table your hand finds mine; we are the only ones who are quiet.

At long last the emerald sea is at our feet at the end of the road with the golden trees; at night we slip out of the house while everyone else is sleeping and swim in the silent pools of glass.

In the sky, two jewels illuminate the night. You, running by the water until your head hurts and then, breathless, laughing, red-faced, you return to me slowly and slowly surround me with your flaming scent.

At the end of the road with the golden trees at the end of the town that I found in a vision in a white house with a cherry tree we whisper our yearnings to each other while everyone else is sleeping

we fall into each other’s dream in the bottom of the emerald sea.

Say it again until it becomes breath, prayer, music; say it again, just because I ask you.

Say it again, even though we both know already; say it so many times that it becomes silence, or the name of a god.

Say it so I don’t forget that even in the time of complete darkness it is still true; say it because incantations because whispers say it for every tear we have given for each other. Say it because it would burn your heart not to say it.

At this very moment all I can give you is this poem as only words can cross such distance. On it,

I am placing all these things that we share, so they can comfort you and walk with you when I’m not there;

that when we dance, the expansion of the Universe slows down down to the space where our breaths meet one is honey, the other is wine

that you learn the words of the songs that you want me to sing so I can sing them as they really are, and not as I remember them

that we got a bigger bed, and still we sleep entangled and wake up at four every night for that time that is made only of truth and darkness that I really enjoyed that bruise that sleeps on poem number five and that I’m really glad you are always as hungry as you were then

that we knew everything about the other before we knew each other at all and not once we were wrong about where and how it hurts and where and how it heals.

0012 Drops Of Light

It’s so easy for me to see you dancing in a place where we’ve never been wearing clothes I know for a fact that you do not own but every detail is there as if we had been there just yesterday and I know what we have been doing

(but not where we’ll be because we’ll stay here until this moment has been consumed entirely)

and I feel as if it is raining drops of light over us our skin wet with joy and oblivion and I am already anticipating your taste

I place your body in my poems hungrily merciless (as a lover should, I think) but your heart, that I do carefully

for I know it is made of glass and saffron and songs about missing me and the gold and lavender light of dawn

and all those things are fragile.

If I could, I would shield it from harm like a tigress watching the darkness

unafraid, deadly, orange and black and blood and the only poetry we’d need would be the fear in the souls of those who dared disturb our sleep.

No matter how many poems I write I never feel like I said what I wanted to say so here we are again at the beginning of the page.

I know you don’t mind that I try once more you save them all and rest on them when the burden of this love is too heavy a nest made of soft words, of whispers and secrets, gold and blue.

What I wanted to say has been said, we both know that, a hundred million times in your world and in mine and I could not care less if nobody else but you reads this and like a bird does not stop for counting I put another feather in the nest this one says you are the only one who can stop the bleeding the next one cries while smiling you are the blessing of light one of my favourites whispers our vows are my destiny

and all of them, like a ghostly choir, sing come,comesoon,wecan’twaitanylonger.

The warm coarseness of your voice always takes me by surprise (a scar from coming from the Land Of Yelling)

in the dim yellow light of a train that parts the night in two we talk about pain quietly, always quietly.

Before the storm comes, we know every time the air changes colour, changes scent, changes our skin, our breath, our time; the indigo darkness is slowly washed clean by the rain, the primeval lover.

While the world is asleep the train is awake, a roaring black serpent inside a shared dream, its destination a secret the Gods hold from us;

in the dim yellow light of a train that parts the night in two the warm coarseness of your voice keeps me awake.

The rain is back at last

the nights that last, the heavy silence of the fog, the salty wind the reading of signs and omens in dreams poetry and the warmth of devotions crossing decades to find us again. Destiny is not an arrow, but a circle; we return to it, blindly. By now, they say, the fever should have dropped we should have slowed down but we have not. Obstinately, ecstatically, with closed eyes, we continue pouring love on each other. Destiny is not an arrow, it’s not; it’s a dark night of obsidian through the gardens of your heart.

If there is something I have learnt from this is that there is no such thing as being replaceable there is no such thing as multiple chances, such thing as many paths.

Sometimes, a name becomes a home (the hands are the keys, the mouth is the door) and there is only one bed where we can sleep. It could only be what it was, and it was you. Only. You. If there is something I have learnt from this is that we are just seconds away from the most beautiful catastrophe.

I would do it you know it again again your sadness only makes it deeper and darker like honey over an open wound but I know no fear or regret you know it you love it.

I would let you do it you know it you like to have control but you don’t like to hear it your darkness only makes it better and stronger like wine on my open mouth have no fear, you won’t regret it you know it.

Tomorrow, when it is time to part instead of saying I’m going to miss you so much today let’s say

I’m going to love you so much today

instead of hurting in advance for what we will miss let’s delight in what we just had the aftertaste of wine

skin

honey

ripeness

harvest

still on our hands. Tomorrow, instead of breaking our own hearts by making them go separate ways let’s allow them to be one as they always wished and live as Gods do. Because you

are the one I will not share.

Imagine, for a moment, if we had had no fear that night and instead of running back home we had danced, drunk with love and magic, and watched the sun rise over our bodies where the river meets the stones and the velvet-like sand, making the whole Universe drown in our golden haze

tell me, my lover, what would you have asked of me?

If we had trusted that we knew already everything we needed to know about each other, that it was the hand of the Gods leading us if we had not been blinded by the wounds we were carrying tell me, my lover, what would you have asked of me?

You of the honey breath you who were made of sand and wine god of the Sweet Dripping Death, keeper of every longing, lie with me by the slow river and I will watch you fall asleep in the afternoon light after Love has taken everything we have.

Our dreams, as they always do, will merge into one; in the land of Holy Trance we will be given visions, but they all say the same thing—our mouths make the drink that Gods devour.

You of the many faces, you of the pomegranate heart with hands that never rest, hands that never rest come with me to the sapphire pools under the jewels of the celestial vault and I will watch you sing in the light of the night after Love has given us everything we are.

A garden made of your translucent taste with flowers that bring the power of prophecy and make your mouth bleed

a holy temple made of whispers in the room that faces the sea the room where the world burns every night, and its ash is powdered light

a bed made of all the rules we did not follow some of them we set ourselves and then broke them for the very pleasure of pleasuring

you are a delight made by the gods in the name of love

a hand that is always warmer than mine

in it you hold the teaching, the keys, the words, the crystals; the bread we will eat today

a mouth that has kept way too many secrets and is craving

to say the truth that is like a storm, and the truth that is like a dove a heart that lives on every inch of skin that always takes me home, awake or in dreams, filled with heaven and lust you are a delight made by the gods in the name of love

In my heart

I keep a list of things that I want to give to you like a room filled with twilight where I can put my ear to your chest and listen to the thunderstorm your emotions make and I would think this flood is my home.

Needless to say, it would be filled with piles of books, thoughts and secrets; conversations that scratch, conversations that pray, silences that drag us underwater your shoes and your bag thrown at the door and I would think this mess is my home.

Coming in from the light among the sumac trees

your contour is just a lavender ghost a ghost with the face of kindness

none of us can look away none of us can change our fate none of us wants to anymore

and as always with you, time slows down, golden and green the serpent in the grass that says be mine, this is the garden the fever of the afternoon and the heart singing so loud that the birds are learning our song. We share the sustenance from our bodies until we are glowing like Gods

none of us will look away anymore.

Coming in from the light that lives in your arms

the masks we wore are left abandoned among the tall grass; we fall. It does not matter what it takes this is where we stay

and I know you will return tomorrow, and the rest of days.

Author Biography

Carolina has been a blogger and essayist on spiritual development for over fifteen years, and this is her first published poetry. Extraordinary Beast is a book about the power and complexity of love, that explores the many sides and faces of human relationships. Her profoundly mystical experience of the wide spectrum of human emotion, plus the influence of her work as a painter, provide a unique point of view that will definitely ignite the reader’s imagination.

Contact Carolina at yourspiritmaster.com